The Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard will be recognizable to anyone who grew up reading the comic-book adventures of Tintin. After spotting Piccard on a Brussels street, the Belgian cartoonist Hergé used his striking appearance as inspiration for Tintin’s scientific friend Professor Cuthbert Calculus. But Piccard should also be recognized for his advancement of a scientific platform that remains important today: the research balloon.

Piccard was an inventor and explorer. In 1930, he designed a pressurized steel gondola that could carry passengers and laboratory equipment beneath a balloon. The vehicle would eventually inspire his deep-ocean bathyscaphe, but in 1931 Piccard and his colleague Paul Kipfer used it to explore the atmosphere, reaching 15,785 metres and measuring cosmic rays. It was a fitting experiment: cosmic rays were discovered in 1912 when Austrian physicist Victor Hess carried electrometers to about 5,000 metres in a perilous open basket beneath a balloon.

Balloons have gone higher and farther for science ever since. Just last week, a NASA long-duration balloon broke the record for flight length when it clocked up its 46th day spinning in the high winds and chilly skies above the South Pole. No scientist hangs beneath this one, but the goal remains the same as in Piccard’s day. The balloon floats some 39 kilometres up and carries the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder, which sifts through high-energy cosmic rays, looking for rare heavy elements.

Balloons could go higher still. This month, NASA raised the prospect that one could be (gently) bolted onto the side of the Inter­national Space Station. The agency calls it an expandable activity module; the media used the terms giant space balloon and bouncy castle. Either way, this balloon (expandable activity module) would not simply support science — it could house it. The agency is in talks with the module’s developer, Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nevada, as to how it could test the module as a living and working habitat in orbit. If they can repel the radiation and pointy micrometeorites that are a hazard of life in space, then inflatable modules could be used to construct whole space stations. The appeal is obvious: such equipment would be compact and therefore cheap to get off the ground and to construct in orbit.

Balloons have been launched into space before. The twin European Vega missions of the mid-1980s deployed one each to hang in the Venusian sky, where they measured wind speed and cloud density. Balloons have even been used to launch rockets towards space. The ‘rockoons’ developed by James Van Allen at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in the 1950s were balloons that carried sounding rockets into the atmosphere and then launched them to ever higher altitudes. When the rockets fell back to Earth, they brought hints of layers of trapped radiation beyond the atmosphere, which became known as Van Allen belts.

Balloons have carried cameras and telescopes to probe various regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and sent plants and animals to the stratosphere. They have been made of plastic and rubber, and used alone or in fleets. They remain silent and surprisingly stable platforms for science. And for more than science — a series of US research balloons used to study pollution in the 1970s doubled as kinetic art. They are important testing grounds for instruments and techniques that will one day fly in space. “Exploration is the sport of the scientist,” Piccard once said. The humble balloon has more than played its part in both, and will continue to do so.