A spacesuit is not Felix Baumgartner's typical attire. He's used to moving freely, his arms and legs swimming easily through the air, his thin flightsuit rippling against his skin in the sky over Taipei, or Rio de Janeiro, or Warsaw; he usually feels wind rushing across the square cut of his jaw. Late on a Friday night in February, he moves across the small room stiffly, one appendage at a time, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, or a boy in a very, very thick snowsuit.
A blue light flashes and a buzzer sounds. Inside the vertical wind tunnel, air whooshes up at Baumgartner at 130 mph, lifting his body in the puffy white pressure suit parallel to the ground.
He oscillates for a moment, porpoising noticeably. "His chest pack is catching a little bit of air," observes Dan Murray, Baumgartner's flight surgeon, watching from outside the plexiglass window.
Then, Baumgartner's form begins to stabilize, hovering concave atop the column of wind. "There we go, he's got it," Murray says. "He figured it out."
A professional skydiver and BASE jumper from Austria, the 41-year-old Baumgartner has already set many world records: highest BASE jump from a building, lowest BASE jump, first person to BASE jump from the 1125-foot Millau Viaduct in France. He's even jumped from an airplane 32,808 feet over Dover, England, in order to free-fall 22 miles across the English Channel wearing a carbon-fiber wing. The spacesuit is necessary for his most audacious record yet, the one that would answer questions about human endurance that have lingered (including in the pages of Popular Mechanics) for the last half-century: the highest and fastest free-fall in history—a leap from the upper stratosphere.
The existing record of 102,800 feet, established by U.S. Air Force test pilot Joe Kittinger, has remained untouched for 50 years. By the end of this year, Baumgartner—backed by energy drink company Red Bull and advised by Kittinger himself—plans to surpass that, rising to a height of 120,000 feet in a pressurized capsule dangling beneath a high-altitude balloon. When he steps out, he'll hurtle toward earth at supersonic speed, breaking the sound barrier with only his spacesuit as the vehicle.
At least, that's the theory. In practice, it has never been done, which is why Baumgartner is training so rigorously now. Today's test is to determine whether he can actually skydive in a pressure suit inflated to 3.5 psi. Bustling around him in the facility in Perris, Calif., are members of the Red Bull Stratos team, chosen for their extensive experience in fields like aerospace, medicine, fabrication, electronics and skydiving.
But Kittinger's record will be difficult to break. "The parachutes have gotten better, the pressure suits have gotten better, the life-support systems have gotten better, the communications have gotten better," Kittinger says, "but the danger and the hazard of being at that altitude has not changed one bit. It's extremely hostile."
Others have tried, and died, over the last five decades. And this year, Baumgartner's not the only person mounting an effort: Michel Fournier, a parachutist and former colonel of the French army, also has his sights set on the stratosphere. This will be his fourth attempt to pilot a balloon to 130,000 feet, and if his skydive is successful, it will be the culmination of a 22-year dream. As Red Bull Stratos methodically moves through a scientific test-flight program—building, testing and simulating each scenario, including the countless things that can go wrong—Fournier has enlisted French and North American crews to join him at a launch site in Western Canada. Determined to beat Baumgartner into the sky and the history books, he's skipping straight to the big jump.
When Excelsior III lifted off from the desert floor of New Mexico on Aug. 16, 1960, it was only Joe Kittinger's 33rd parachute jump. He wore a partial-pressure suit like those designed for high-altitude pilots; the Project Mercury astronauts hadn't yet flown. As he ascended at 1200 feet per minute in an open gondola, passing through temperatures minus 100 F, the air bladders in his suit inflated to compensate for the reduced atmospheric pressure—all except for those in his right glove. Calculating that he could execute the mission without the use of that hand, which began to swell painfully, he declined to inform ground control.
When he reached peak altitude, Kittinger floated for 11 minutes toward his target, looking out over a "deep, dark indescribable blue" with wispy white clouds that were luminous from the sun. With his hand twice its normal size, and burdened by 160 pounds of equipment, he completed the 46 items on his checklist, pushed a button to start the cameras and said a quick prayer. Then he stepped over the threshold. "I rolled over onto my back and could see the capsule and the balloon roaring into space at a fantastic rate," he says. "And then I realized the balloon was standing still and it was me going down." Accelerating at 32 feet per second squared, he eventually reached 614 mph—just shy of the speed of sound.
Kittinger was already familiar with the dangers. During an earlier jump from 76,400 feet, a timer on his multistage parachute activated early and a pilot chute deployed only 2.5 seconds after he left the gondola. It pulled out a drogue, but with too little air density to billow out, it wound around Kittinger's neck. He went into a flat spin; blood surged to his brain, and he passed out. At 18,000 feet the main canopy, sensing the change in barometric pressure, automatically deployed, but it tangled in the drogue as Kittinger continued to tumble toward the ground. At 11,000 feet the reserve chute deployed, and at 6000 feet, finally freed of the main canopy, it fully unfurled.
But in August, the redesigned gear worked perfectly, and Kittinger spent the 4 minutes and 36 seconds of his free-fall assessing it thoroughly: "I was a test pilot, and my job was to gather information," he says. "I never had an opportunity to just relax and contemplate what was going on." The drogue chute Kittinger used to stabilize his fall and the automatic-opener device on his reserve parachute are now standard gear among high-altitude pilots and parachutists. His partial-pressure suit evolved into the suits used by shuttle astronauts.
"To me, the big difference between Project Excelsior and everything that's come after is that Project Excelsior had a clear, justifiable and urgent mission," says Craig Ryan, co-author of Come Up and Get Me, an autobiography of Kittinger published this June. "It was to prove the viability of emergency escape from super-high-altitude vehicles. This was necessary work, because for the first time we were sending pilots and astronauts to extraordinary heights, and we didn't really know how to get them back if anything went wrong."
History has shown there are many ways to die at high altitudes. Pyotr Dolgov, a parachutist for a Soviet ballooning program, leaped from the Volga at 93,970 feet in 1962. His faceplate cracked and his spacesuit depressurized; he died almost immediately from hypoxia—oxygen rushing to leave his body for the vacuum of space. In May 1966, a gondola carrying American skydiver Nick Piantanida rose to 57,600 feet before he either accidentally or purposely opened his own faceplate. His team brought him back down, but he slipped into a coma and died months later. Since then, not a single super-high-altitude manned balloon flight has left the ground.
If Baumgartner or Fournier succeeds, the technology and techniques they demonstrate would be of interest to NASA, the military's suborbital spaceflight program and, most of all, the burgeoning industry of private space. A handful of companies are now racing to develop technology that would take civilians into low Earth orbit. "But none of them are really thinking beyond what's called shirt-sleeve technology, where they're going to put somebody in a regular jumpsuit in a space capsule and they're going to fly," says Art Thompson, Red Bull Stratos's technical project director. "We're looking at the next step. What happens if you need to get out?"
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The nacelle belonging to 66-year-old Michel Fournier looks like a relic of a bygone space program. Covered by quilted silver insulation, it's roughly the shape of a hot-water heater and not that much bigger. Inside, there is just enough room for a single seat and some electronic controls; stickers along the top read "Who Dares Wins" in both English and French. In fact, Fournier himself is an artifact of such a program: a skydiving project by the French Defense Ministry to test equipment for the first European space shuttle. The project was canceled in the late 1980s and the shuttle shortly after, but Fournier never gave up the ambition behind it.
In mid-May, the nacelle sits inside a small metal hangar on the far end of a tiny airfield in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Fournier's countrymen work behind long pressed-wood tables covered with power tools, parts and a battered gray space helmet; a cardboard box containing food and a bottle of Merlot sits nearby. The North American half of the team can be found in the back of the hangar, where they are busy installing a helium vent valve in the thin plastic balloon spilling out of a large crate.
Fournier's past attempts have been plagued by balloon problems. Weather ended his first try at the record, in 2002, after wind ripped away the inflation tube. When his team tried to launch again the following year, the balloon itself ruptured. In 2008, everyone cheered as the gossamer-thin craft floated up into the sky, but then gasped as they realized the capsule hadn't. A mechanism linking the two had fired prematurely, leaving Fournier on the ground.
Author Craig Ryan was there for the first attempt and observes the team did not function as a well-oiled machine. "These projects need more than a daredevil," he says. "Daredevils are a dime a dozen." Such endeavors need money, technology and a crew with expertise—which everyone seems optimistic Fournier has finally assembled. This year, the balloon's Nevada-based manufacturer handpicked balloon pilots from around the U.S. to handle the launch. "Hell, yeah, we're going to get 'er done," drawls Jim Roybal, a lanky pilot from Fort Worth, Texas. "We came up here to get this guy to where he wants to go, and that's what we're gonna do."
A fourth crucial requirement, Ryan says, is strong leadership. But at the operation's unofficial headquarters, a small motor lodge a few miles from the airfield, Fournier's team has segregated by native language. The French gather in motel rooms and the small, sunny lobby. The American pilots and a group of Canadian ham radio enthusiasts, charged with tracking the balloon and capsule, stake out a picnic table and grill in the corner of the parking lot.
At 1:30 am on the day of the launch, the balloon pilots begin to stir. Mark Conner, the team meteorologist and a staff scientist at an environmental consulting firm in Omaha, leans against the motel's peach-colored siding, coffee mug in hand. He explains that the ideal launch conditions are very light winds in the lowest layers of the atmosphere, which typically require getting the balloon off the ground at dawn. The current wind speed is 6 mph—right at the upper limit. "All week long, no day would have worked," says Phil Bryant, a structural engineer who owns a balloon repair station in Houston. "This morning, it's just meant to be. It'll calm down."
The team drives to the airfield, and soon headlights pierce the darkness as a forklift lumbers down the runway, ferrying the large plywood crate with the roughly 8-million-cubic-foot balloon packed neatly inside. In the distance, Fournier's capsule sits illuminated in a cone of light. At 4 am, the sky lightens to a deep purple, then a smoky blue. The Canadian flag whipping over the main terminal slows to a lazy wave and finally hangs limp from its pole. By 5:30, the small crowd of local observers peering through binoculars along a chain-link fence can see the balloon stretched out for 400 feet along the runway. Fournier, in a bright yellow spacesuit, sits prebreathing pure oxygen in the open door of the capsule.
No one moves to fill the balloon for another 2 hours. Word ripples out that a problem with Fournier's suit was responsible for the delay. Finally, the helium truck rumbles to life, and the balloon begins to float up off the runway, slim and transparent like a man-o'-war. Then, the steady hum of the truck stops, and the press agent's cellphone rings. "Oh, shi-i-it," she says into it. "Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit." Fournier's reserve parachute popped open in the capsule during a pressurization test, she says. The attempt has to be terminated for the day.
Only, rescheduling the launch is not that simple. Stratospheric balloons are made of a sheer, low-density polyethylene plastic as thin as a dry-cleaning bag. They're one-time use. The pilots vent the gas and carefully spool the balloon back into its crate, but it may have stretched.
Back at the lodge, the balloon's manufacturer, Mark Caviezel, joins the North American support team at the picnic table. He leans back in his chair, stirring a glass of Jack Daniels with his finger. "Mr. Fournier wants to fly on Tuesday," he announces. "Let me say that again: Mr. Fournier wants to fly on Tuesday." The team waits expectantly; a few people shake their heads. "He's got issues with his balloon. He's got issues with his spacesuit. He's got issues with his chute," Caviezel says. He's asked how much of the balloon actually filled with helium. "About 60 to 70 feet," he replies. "One option we didn't discuss is to cut and reterminate the balloon. You'd probably lose a million cubic feet. You can still get record-breaking altitude. You can still have supersonic free-fall." Would Caviezel be willing to do that? "Among the core crew," he says, "the sentiment is not only no, but hell no. My professional meteorologist is telling me I have five days of nonflyable weather and [the French] tell me Tuesday is looking good." Conner confirms: "I don't think Tuesday's looking any better than tomorrow and tomorrow's shit." "Can you put that in laymen's terms?" someone asks.
They discuss it further: the weather, their protocol as pilots, their concerns about the rest of the team's preparation. They note that they have to get back to their jobs—some have taken vacation days to volunteer. Finally, they talk about how much they like Fournier.
"I don't want to send the man up just to die," Roybal says.
"I agree," Caviezel says. "He's a nice guy."
The next morning, the pilots fly home, and the Canadian hams drive back to Edmonton. Fournier walks from his room to the lobby, where his countrymen are once again congregating. The day before, as a distant figure in a yellow spacesuit being ushered off the tarmac, he looked small—and he still does. But Fournier's demeanor is chipper, as though everything is going according to plan. When asked whether he'll try again, he smiles broadly and says, in French, "Oh, yes, we'll wait five days for the weather!" His equipment disappears from the hangar a few days later, but he'll be back, he tells the people of North Battleford. Hold the hangar for August.
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The capsule built for Felix Baumgartner at Sage Cheshire Aerospace, a private shop in Lancaster, Calif., looks not so much like the relic of an early space program as a shiny scale model of one manufactured for a museum. Its sleek, silvery shell is bell-shaped, like the Gemini. A half-inch-thick round acrylic door, 4 feet in diameter, swivels cleanly to one side on internal rails.
Beneath the fiberglass shell, it's outfitted like a spacecraft. "When you get above 120,000 feet, you're at around 0.2 percent atmosphere," says Art Thompson, who's also Sage Cheshire's co-founder. "So there's very little difference between being at 120,000 feet and being on the moon." A pressure sphere molded from fiberglass and epoxy and surrounded by a load-bearing cage of chrome-moly steel contains the craft's instrumentation, including manual controls for a redundant life-support system.
Whereas Kittinger ascended in an open gondola, Baumgartner's capsule will be pressurized to 8 psi so that he can ride safely up with his suit uninflated (and back down, in the event that the suit becomes compromised). But once Baumgartner opens the door, the inside of the craft will be exposed to the stratosphere—as will all the systems it holds.
"One of the unique things about this aircraft is that it goes up under a balloon and comes down under a parachute, and it goes up under pressure and comes back down under a vacuum condition," says Michael McDowell, the capsule's electrical and test engineer. "So this is very unlike any standard aircraft in that we're going to see cold, we're going to see vacuum, and then at the end of our trip, we don't land on wheels."
Also unlike with a standard aircraft, more than half of the 100 switches on the instrument panels control camera systems: On the capsule alone, nine high-definition, three digital still and three ultra-high-res video cameras will film the attempt for the benefit of ground control and to provide live footage for a television and Web audience. A separate lithium-ion battery system powers the camera equipment so as not to interfere with critical functions of the capsule; communications are transmitted through independent radio-telemetry systems as well.
The capsule with its payload—both human and electronic—weighs about 2500 pounds; Fournier's is about 1100; Kittinger's gondola was 920. "This is weight-critical in that any extra pound of payload decreases the altitude that it can reach under the balloon," says Bill Dodson, the capsule's chief engineer. To rise to the record-breaking 120,000 feet, Baumgartner's balloon will have to be 30 million cubic square feet in capacity—more than three times the size of Fournier's and 10 times Kittinger's. It will climb at about 1000 feet per minute until it reaches altitude, where it will swell to approximately 400 feet in diameter as Baumgartner prepares to step out.
The toes of Baumgartner's thick white boots creep to the edge of the narrow step. He leans out ever so slightly, his gloved hands grasping the gray handrails at each side. His dark faceplate glints briefly in the sun. Then, a bunny hop. Both feet leave the platform at the same time, knees gently bent, and he hurtles toward the earth. Suddenly, he jerks back upward, whipping violently around with a loud thwap as his bungee cord slaps his helmet, then briefly wraps around a leg of his pressure suit. He twists in the air and bounces again and again until the line hangs still, and a yellow Champion crane slowly lowers him to the ground.
He lifts his faceplate and sinks into a folding chair as his team crowds around him. "It looked like you leaned forward," Dan Murray says. "That's not the way you want to go." Baumgartner nods, his face intense with concentration.
He is now nearly three years into the project's development and training and less than six months from the final jump. Everyone is aware of Fournier's attempt the week before. "You can never rush a scientific test program to meet somebody else's jump schedule," Thompson says. "If you do, you're making a major mistake. If Fournier jumps, Fournier jumps. If we get there first, we get there first. But we need to be sensible."
And so, at a fairground a few miles from Sage Cheshire, Baumgartner is practicing taking that all-important first step. "I want to have all the confidence in the world," he says, "because at the end of the day we still have one big unknown, and that's what happens to the human body when you reach the speed of sound." If he begins to tumble at 120,000 feet, he can go into a deadly uncontrolled spin. At that altitude, there's not enough air density for him to correct himself or for a drogue chute to be effective.
But after the first 18 to 20 seconds, a drogue chute can help. Luke Aikins, Baumgartner's aerial strategist, has designed a drogue unlike any other: It's independent of the main and reserve chutes and will deploy automatically if he experiences 3.5 g's for 6 seconds—about 96 revolutions per minute. The plan, though, is not to use a drogue at all. The team wants to prove that a person could do a high-altitude re-entry, passing from subsonic through transonic to supersonic flight and back again, while controlling his body positioning.
In order to do that, Baumgartner needs a pressure suit with some flexibility. His is a hybrid of those worn by U-2 pilots and astronauts, with an important distinction: It is designed to inflate to the standing position and has articulated joints in the hips and shoulders. Still, it is a little like being inside a football. "By the time I step off it's already been 5 hours in that suit," Baumgartner says. "You're completely worn out in that moment. But this is the moment when everything starts. It's not over yet. You need to get back to earth, safely."
Ideally, he will rotate into a delta position as he's falling, head slightly down and arms and legs outstretched behind him like a diving osprey. At around 100,000 feet, he'll reach Mach 1. "Nobody's ever accelerated through the sound barrier and decelerated back through it, and monitoring him during that is going to give us a lot of information," says Jon Clark, the project's medical director and the space medicine adviser to the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. "Can it be done?"
Baumgartner stands in the door of the basket as the crane slowly lifts him back into the air. From 200 feet below, his white suit is just a smudge against the faded red paint of the steel lattice. The cord hangs beneath him in a long graceful loop, swaying in the wind.
In the corner of the parking lot, Joe Kittinger and Einar Enevoldson, the team's high-altitude research consultant, sit in folding chairs, gazing up at him under the brims of their hats. Enevoldson has flown more than 300 kinds of aircraft and set eight world records, five of which still stand. The men, a little rounder and thinner, respectively, now, and freckled with age spots, wear the signs of their long distinguished careers—but they're still every bit test pilots. "Joe and I, our goal wasn't to set records—we were just doing our daily jobs," Enevoldson says. "You have to go about this in a businesslike way."
Asked if he'd given his first step this much consideration, Kittinger promptly replies: "I gave it a year and a half of thought. I did it in my mind 1000 times, and in a pressure chamber 30 times. I didn't want to go headfirst, so I thought I'd just do a short hop, and it worked out perfect. That's what Felix will do too."
Baumgartner moves forward to the edge of the basket. He stands, a bit straighter now, pauses, and then gives a short hop. He falls in slow-motion, a tiny white figure, like a toy parachutist dropping from the sky. "Beautiful," Enevoldson says. "I think he was too much feet forward," Kittinger replies. "He's got to get rotated around." Baumgartner bounces a few times, cleanly, and then is lowered to the ground. He wants to go back up. In a few months, he'll have one shot at that first step, one chance to break the record. But today, he can try it again and again.
