SPACE DIVING
by
William Thomas

ON THE SHORES OF NEAR SPACE
Set by the International Aeronautical Federation between 75,000 feet and 62.5 miles (100km) up, the realm you temporarily inhabit is called Near Space. Vehicles like yours are “nearcraft”.

If Earth is a beach ball, its life-giving atmosphere is the thickness of a sheet of typing paper. Uncrewed weather balloons routinely reach 90,000 feet. Scientific balloons can remain for days at 132,000 feet, and the world record for unmanned balloons is a little over 32 miles straight up.

Your rate of ascent has almost stopped. Looking through the open lattice overhead, you feel a surge of strong affection for the big balloon holding you aloft. After a tricky fueling procedure that began at 2 am, the 200 foot tall inflated lozenge contained some two million cubic-feet of gravity-canceling helium at takeoff. Now, in just 1% of normal air pressure, the silvery 20 stories-high polybag is 25 stories wide. Made from material no thicker than a plastic sandwich bag, Excelsior III should still be on the ground.

ONE HAND CLAPPING
By 5:28 am that morning, you had been breathing pure oxygen for nearly an hour and a half, purging your lungs for an ascent as risky in its rapidity as a free dive to the seafloor. A minute later, with a big storm system out of Texas threatening the launch site, the mission meteorologist scrubbed the flight.

But Murphy, of course, had already launched you one full minute ahead of schedule. When the doctor's orders came through you were a thousand feet too late, lifting away from the desert at 1,200 feet per minute.

The pain in your right hand is becoming intense. About 90 minutes ago, passing through 43,000 feet on the ascent, you were able to easily flex your usually stiff pressure glove. Bad sign. With blood no longer flowing past some unglimpsed malfunction, your hand will painfully freeze and swell as the temperature and pressure continues dropping with altitude. But you knew that if you radioed the doc, he will order you to land. And you might never get another chance at taking a chance many consider suicidal. Concern of those who care about you aside, there are plenty of threatened egos in the air force who don't want this flight to happen.

CLIMBING THE STRATO STAIRS
But neither friend nor enemies have reckoned with Captain Joe Kittinger. You continued climbing. At 60,000 feet your rate of climb jumped to 1,300 feet per minute. If it edged up another notch, the extreme temperature and pressure drops of rapid ascent could crack your two-thousandths-of-an-inch thick balloon like a frozen freezer bag. Ignoring your useless right hand, you vented enough helium to reduce the rate of climb to a more leisurely 950 ft per minute.

By 90,000 feet, your ripcord hand had swollen to about twice its normal size. If the glove glitch migrates to your helmet or pressure suit, in near vacuum your blood will boil in seconds. One hour and thirty-one minutes after launch, your pressure altimeter stops climbing. More precise radars on the ground show you hovering at 102,800 feet. You have reached float altitude.

The radio crackles again. You aren't quite over the target, so you let the balloon drift for 11 more minutes on an imperceptible easterly breeze. Sunlight burns like a welder's torch beneath the aluminized antiglare curtain and the gondola's open door. Sitting in your gondola as it gently turns with the balloon's slow rotations, you begin to sweat despite the polar temperatures.

It's 7:12 in the morning on the edge of space.

Time to jump.

LEAPER
You last tried this nine months ago, in November 1959, flying the first Excelsior to 76,000 feet before taking the shortcut home.

Already worried about flight crews forced to eject from its new high performance jets, the air force wanted to know if future astronauts could escape malfunctioning space capsules on the brink of the atmosphere. Aircraft struggling for lift could not remain there long enough to provide useful numbers. But balloons could.

As head of the high altitude Escape program, you were tasked with finding answers. Who better than a Master Parachutist with over 1,000 parachute jumps and the first Man High solo ascent to make the longest leap ever attempted by anyone not yet wearing angel's wings?

GLITCH
In 1958, you moved to the Escape Section of the Aeromedical Laboratory, and joined Project Excelsior. Two years later, no one is yet sure if a human can survive a parachute jump from the edge of space. Your first Excelsior jump at a much lower altitude suggested an emphatic, “Maybe.”

Best guess was that without proper stabilization from a small initially deploying chute, crewmembers ejecting from aerospace vehicles would enter a “death-spin”, whirling like propellers at nearly 200 revolutions-per-minute before auguring into the ground.

This surmise proved drastically correct. On that first near-space jump last November, your small stabilizing chute opened as advertised. But Murphy was also along for the ride. Instead of deploying 16 seconds into freefall, the gremlin that hides in all complex systems popped your stabilizing chute in just two. Then he snapped a chokehold on your neck and spun you like a dervish.

Just like the Sufis, you nearly met God. Blacking out, you were unable to deploy your main canopy before going splat. Happily, at 10,000 feet, your altimeter-rigged emergency chute popped open automatically. You were still unconscious when you hit the ground.

After your fractures healed, you tried again. On December 11, 1959 you ascended to 74,700 feet on a helium cloud, then jumped into the record books with a mind-bending 55,000-foot free-fall.

MOLECULES OF MOTION
Now, with a hurting hand and a fighter pilot's confidence tinged by body memories of that earlier terrible fall, you intend to override self-preservation and skydive from the edge of space.

The realization floods your tissues with even more adrenalin, noradrenalin and growth hormones. Your breathing booms loud in your mask. Your hypothalamus orders your pituitary gland to pump ACTH, which triggers the adrenal glands to start producing cortisol. As your immune system gears up to provide internal first aid, emergency reserves of glucose are released to fuel intense busts of muscle activity in a classic “fight or flight” response.

You opt for flight. Finishing your 46-step checklist, you disconnect your balloon's power supply, severing all communication with the ground. Taking a last look around, your gaze falls on the license plate your five year-old son cut it from a cereal box. Turning to the door, you silently pray, “Lord, take care of me now.”

Then you step through it.

HUMAN BULLET
Immediately, you sense trouble. Unlike all your other jumps, there is no sensation of falling. Without any air resistance, you feel like you're floating.

Rolling over, you look up at the balloon zooming upwards into space. Then you realize it's you traveling in the opposite direction at a fantastic rate. The altimeter on your wrist is unwinding almost in a blur. But there is no indication of speed.

Thirteen seconds pass about as fast as 13 years. Your hand still hurts. As you bodysurf the curve of the planet, the view is more mind-bending than any LSD-chewing hippie could ever hope to hallucinate.

At 96,000 feet, your six-foot stabilization chute opens on cue. But you continue to accelerate for another 6,000 feet. This unprecedented 12,800 foot drop down Earth's gravity well propels you to 614 miles an hour - nine-tenths the speed of sound. If you live, you will hold the record for the greatest speed attained by a human without the use of an engine.

Your body is an airplane. Moving faster than a bullet in near vacuum, no wind whistles or billows your flight suit. You have absolutely no sensation of this incredible speed.

Suddenly, it's difficult to breathe. You figure that the base of your helmet must be pressing against your throat. You wrestle with Murphy to keep from passing out.

At 70,000 feet, breathing through your oxygen mask is easier. Your feet are still pointing down, which seems better than landing on your head. Then warm air condenses inside your faceplate, fogging your vision.

Four and a half-minutes after stepping off your veranda, you have fallen 85,000 feet!

As air resistance slowly increases, your speed drops to the speed of an Indy racecar. By 20,000 feet you're down to a sedate 120 miles per hour - “terminal velocity” for a falling human being with arms and legs extended. The air pressing through your jumpsuit feels warmer. The cloud deck is rushing up so fast, you flinch. You have to remind yourself that it's vapor and not solid.

Surviving a jump from near space means knowing when to pull the ripcord. Pop your main parachute too early and too fast, and it will rip into bright, useless streamers. Wait too long, and they'll bury what's left of you in a jar.

Go figure.

You and a dozen slide-rules already have. At 17,500 feet, you deploy your main 28-foot canopy. If the engineers are right, this will be your last big jump before your next bail-out - over North Vietnam.

PLAYING RECORDS
You live.

Eight months later, Ross and Prather set the altitude record for a crewed balloon by flying to 113,740 feet. But they don't come home without it. On November 1, 1962, the Russian Roger Andreyev takes the world's free fall record with a “pure” ripcord jump from 80,325 feet. Though you jumped from a higher ledge, preserving your life with that tiny stabilizer chute has disqualified you from the official free-fall record.

But in the end, not even Superman will surpass Captain Joe Kittinger's records of highest parachute jump, longest freefall, and fastest speed ever attained by a human flying without a vehicle through Earth's atmosphere.

WHY RISK IT?
Until recently, academics who have never been to sea, gazed over receding summit ridges, cornered a car at its limits - or experienced the aphrodisiacal effect of risk takers reflected in the eyes and elevated heart rates of the opposite sex - were baffled by boldness. Because psychoanalysis and learning theory peddled the bizarre notion that humans “naturally” seek to eliminate stress and simulation, deliberate risk taking seemed dysfunctional. Professors whose biggest uncertainties were winning tenure couldn't conceive why anyone would calmly embark on exploits that would petrify any “sane” person.

Flummoxed by Freud, psychoanalysts at the turn of the last century decided that overcoming our ancient arboreal fears of falling was “obviously” evidence of a distressed mind. Other shrinks sounded just as nuts when they declared that risking death is “a disguised desire for annihilation” - that (think about it) would permanently preclude any future opportunities for more thrills.

Still others argued that jumping out of perfectly good aircraft “must be” over-compensation for repressed feelings of “masculine inadequacy” - which makes space divers particularly pathological, while leaving female leapers in limbo. I certainly did not feel I was compensating for any “inadequacy” when I made for the open Pacific aboard my small, homemade trimaran, or exited a Cessna in perfect running order 3,000-feet above a Wisconsin countryside.

Nor did I feel like a “devil” - daring or otherwise.

Not once did I ask - not even during hurricanes off Point Conception and Kiribati, or while hurtling screaming the chute- opening count toward the ground, what am I doing here?

I knew exactly what I was doing there. Like Hillary, Kittredge, Chichester and so many others much braver than me, I just wanted to see…

And if I got an eyeful (as I did!) - whose doing was that?

Besides, all this academic hand-wringing bafflegab ignores all those risk-taking hominids who spent millions of years becoming human by scouting safe water holes and caves vacant of tenants with big teeth and claws for their clans. Any band intent on avoiding sharp tusks would not have eaten much mastodon. Just as anyone totally adverse to risk-taking today would not cross a busy street.

The Rule is simple: No risk, no reward.

JUMP CUTS
The first attempt to break Joe Kittinger's superbly planned and executed freefall record comes in 1965, when a New Jersey truck driver named Nick Piantanida encounters equipment failure. When his face mask blows out, lack of oxygen causes severe brain damage. After a four-month coma, Piantanida dies. [Dropzone.com]

In March 2001, CNN announces that Aussie ex-commando Rodd Millner is just “days away” from leaping into thin air nearly 40 kilometres above Alice Springs, the bull's eye of Australia. Though only a novice sky-diver, the intrepid space jumper “expects to reach speeds of between 1,600 and 1,800 kilometres.”

On being called a “dare devil,” Millner bridles. "Evel Knievel would develop an idea without scientific preparation,” he tells Wired's Craig Offman. “But I think differently: How can I do this and live?"

In 1999, Millner read about proposed round-the-world balloon flights. Too tedious. He didn't buy it. Instead, he researched Joe Kittinger's quick trip and called a documentary filmmaking pal with a proposal: I take the dive. You take the pictures. With that arrangement made, the stunt was on.

Contradictions are all in a day's work for this new space diving contender. As a vegetarian soldier, Lieutenant Millner once taught how to lay land mines. Now he wants some of Space Dive's proceeds to go to anti-land-mine programs. Though he isn't a churchgoer, on the way up to his jump altitude he will pray to whatever god will listen.

CHERYL STEARNS
Jumping from the same altitude, rival Cheryl Stearns intends to break the sound barrier by diving head-first toward an indifferent but very solid Earth. According to the website of this world champion skydiver - cherylstearns.com - “The speed that Cheryl will be traveling (1.3 mach) infers that she will break the barrier, although we are not sure that she will have the mass to actually make this happen."

At 46, Stearns holds a master's degree in aeronautical science and was the first female admitted to the US Army's elite parachute group, the Golden Knights. In 1995, she jumped 352 times in a single day, shattering her own Guinness world record.

For this Army reservist and commercial airline captain piloting Boeing 737s, Stearns' “StratoQuest” mission seems the next logical “step” after making 13,050 skydives - more parachute jumps of any woman on (or more accurately, off) the planet. With some 30 world records under her helmet, Stearns is ready to rock.

Carefully.

"Respect a sport, respect your equipment, and respect your judgment" is how this veteran parachutist puts it.

Lofted, like Millner, to above 99% of the Earth's atmosphere, Stearns will wear a customized pressurized space suit. Like Superwoman without a cape, if her head-down position gets her through the transonic and then supersonic speed regimes, she will once again face a an even more dangerous transonic phase as she re-enters heavier, thicker atmosphere.

“At this point,” her website notes, “her skydiving skills are to be tested in order to maintain stability until parachute deployment.”

A skydiver at age 17, the current and 17-time U.S. women's parachuting champion holds 29 world records, including World Champion of Style and Accuracy Skydiving. After becoming the first woman member of the Golden Knights - the US Army's elite parachute team - she parachuted into the grounds of the Statue of Liberty trailing the American flag. She went on to become the only woman (joining one man) who has won the world championship twice.

This champion skydiver also holds the Diplome Leonardo da Vinci - the world's highest award in aerosports. A Boeing 737 co-pilot for US Air, she has logged over 11,000 flying hours and more than 15,900 aircraft landings.

Wired's Craig Offman visits Stearns in her ranch home near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As they talk, 11 cats cross her patio. “Small and sinewy with curly hair, Stearns possesses the conflicting characteristics that may be a prerequisite for considering a jump like this: wild defiance coupled with unusual fastidiousness,” Offman observes.

Does she ever fear for her life? "It's there," Stearns said. "It's a little thing on my shoulder that keeps me from doing stupid things." [Wired Aug/01]

SPIN OUT
Both Millner and Stearns intend to take their next Big Step five miles higher than Captain Joe Kittinger.

"Once you step out of the balloon," says skydiving veteran Tad Smith, "it's theory." It's tricky trying to stabilize a human body falling like a lead safe through very nonsupportive air. If Millner or Stearns break Mach and spin out… "I won't be able to do much at that point," concedes Space Dive's, Dougal Watson.

STEARNS FIRST
Tentatively set to dent New Mexican skies in October 2001, it is not until the morning of August 5, 2003 that Cheryl Stearns enters her gondola. Still attached to the truck, the giant polymer balloon slowly begins bulging with helium. Two hours later - around 9 am -the balloon is launched!

And rips across the top.

Hypertextbook.com provide the epilogue, “The 2003 Big Jump attempt failed."

Rescheduled as an army reserve recruiting promotion to entice more Baghdad RPG-fodder, the stunt is rebooked for April or September 2004 at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas to take advantage of forecast favorable conditions at 130,000 feet.

It never happens.

After failing to come up with $6.5 million, Cheryl Stearns vanishes from space diving contention. Given the $2 billion it's costing every week to blow up Iraq, surely the White House, Bechtel, Blackwater or Halliburton could have come up with her jump costs.

What about that mad Aussie?

MILLNER'S DREAM JUMP
Hefting nearly 550 pounds of specialized survival gear along with his own frame, Rodd Millner dangles beneath an open, Styrofoam and aluminum gondola. Above his helmeted head, a 258,000 square-foot plastic balloon levitated by 12 million-cubic-feet of helium floats serenely, a silver sliver in the deep indigo of near space.

But Millner is gazing down, down, down through 25 miles of empty air to the vague pastel reddish smear that is Australia. A speck heliographs sunglint. It must be the launch site.

Millner spots Ayers Rock. Rising 1,142 feet from the center of the continent, its 6 mile circumference is “just a dark freckle,” writes Anne Marie Owens for DropZone.com. Millner once told a U.S. radio host that he'd picked the middle of Australia as his drop zone so he wouldn't "miss" his home country.

Recalling that larrikinism, the self-styled star of the Space Dive project grins. Is he losing it? Is he succumbing to rapture of the heights? Someone said that at this alien altitude, Earthlings could experience "breakaway syndrome" - yo-yoing between feeling ecstatic and completely detached and alone. His ground crew's voice - Watson's - brings Millner back to surreality: "Have a good one, you lucky bastard."

He'd better. Barely a sky-toddler, he only has 400 jumps under his ripcord.

Two-and-a-half hours up. Ten minutes down. That's the sked. It's warm in the upper stratosphere - almost zero. Farther down, at the top of the troposphere where weather forms and the air is thick enough to hold the cold, he can expect to encounter a frosty -80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Millner focuses, inhales, and with a gambler's prayer rolls off his spacey perch.

“He has no sensation of falling,” Owens recounts. “He turns on his back, sees the balloon shoot into the distance as he accelerates toward Mach 1. His stomach wilts. He vanishes beneath the gaze of God.”

She isn't kidding. Millner does vanish from God's purview. And just about everyone else's.

So what happened?

Nothing happened. Millner never jumped. In fact, he never got anywhere near the edge of space. Owens' dramatic fantasy anticipated a space jump that never took place.

“Kinto” filed this reality check in March 2006: “Rodd Millner can still be found jumping around Sydney, Australia. He's mostly into wingsuit jumps now. Don't know if his jumping got any better but when he was claiming to be 'space jumping' he had just started skydiving (and was crap at it). Basically he had a load of cash and knew some very good PR people. He got all caught up in the skydiving buzz and decided that he could do it from space... Almost everyone at Picton DZ (where Rodd was jumping at the time) won their bets that he would never actually pull it off (or even come close to getting above 14000ft).”

“Lestrade” added this further disclaimer in December 2006: “Yes indeed. I met Rodd in May of 2001 when he was "assisting" in the base of a 55-way formation skydive from a dozen or so Cessna aircraft at Corowa. The skydive was so far beyond his capabilities that even with several very experienced people launching a 4-way, it took almost the entire skydive to get Rodd righted and flying stable. Of course the formation never stood a chance of completing. In conversation with him, it was obvious to me that he didn't have the slightest idea of the dangers of a high-altitude skydive, much less those of one requiring a full-pressure suit. It was also obvious that if he ever made such a jump, he would surely die from ignorance and lack of competency.” [velociworld.com]

Oops!

Looks like there's more to space diving than doing a full-gainer off the dock!

FOURNIER'S FOLLY
Very very very high above Saskatchewan, a 58-year-old retired French parachute regiment officer who was refused permission by his own government to risk spreading jam over the Plaine of Crau, has also informed the press he, too, intends to jump out of a perfectly good pressurized gondola at 40,000 metres.

Hoping to freefall faster than the speed of sound within 30 seconds of foreclosing on second thoughts, the French record holder for the longest fall - from an altitude of about 37,000 feet - has made some 8,000 jumps. Michel Fournier says he wants to shatter four world records for the highest, fastest and longest freefall jump, and the highest balloon ascent.

"I'm a realistic go-getter, a little stubborn at times, Fournier modestly describes himself.

His 130,000-foot high dive is expected to last 6 minutes 25 seconds. Fournier grandly calls it the first big aeronautical exploit of the third millennium.

But after taking 10 years, nearly $3.5 million, the talents of more than two dozen scientists, physicians and engineers, and “periods of meditation,” Le Grand Saut - The Big Jump - is called off because it's too windy. [Dropzone.com]

Is the only hot air in balloons?

HYPE DOES NOT MAKE HEROES
“Where's My Spacedive?” asks a vexed Velociworld. After delaying her 130,000-foot free fall until September 2005, Cheryl Stearns vanished from the Space Dive competition.

“I don't know what the hell happened to Michel Fournier after his 2003 attempt didn't pan out,” Velociworld continues. “Rodd Millner dropped out of the news in 2001.” [velociworld.com]

Ah, Monsieur Fournier. His website lashes out at a “pseudo sponsor' whose alleged “financial swindle” provided a timely excuse to call off the Great Pratfall. [legrandsaut.org]

That was in July 2005.

Since then, blessed silence has replaced the overheated space diving scene.

Captain Joe Kittinger still holds the crown.

On dignity, as well.

Other Sources:
wonderquest.com
College Physics, 1987
National Geographic Dec/60
Air Force Magazine June/85
USA Today Feb 12/99
CNN Mar 6/01
Wired Aug/01
CNN July 31/03
BBC Aug 3/03
Spacecom June 8/01

      Nick Kaloterakis space diver painting popsci.com

  jpaerospace.com

USAF photo

USAF photo

Cheryl Stearns

Fournier photo

Felix Baumgartner flies batwing