Two years ago this month, Felix Baumgartner broke a record with his near-space skydive in which he broke the sound barrier.
Alan Eustace, a Vice-President of Knowledge at
The funny thing is, though, is that in a project nearly three years in the making, it wasn't until the last minute that anyone knew he was going to.
"As we were watching him go up today, somebody asked us what the record was," Paragon Space Development CEO Grant Anderson told me. "We had to look it up! It was cool to break the record, but frankly it was not in the forefront of our minds at all."
Eustace first approached Paragon, which specializes in developing life support equipment for extreme environments, including space, in December of 2011. The goal - apart from the fun of the stunt itself - was to develop technologies that could be useful for more human exploration of the stratosphere and beyond.
The day of the flight began with a four-hour stint in an oxygen chamber, where Eustace had the nitrogen in his lung and tissues slowly "washed out."
The spacesuit itself was absolutely necessary - at the altitude Eustace flew to, the atmosphere is so thin that a human can't breathe. Also, the pressure is so low that even at the cool temperatures, the fluids in the body will begin to boil
The balloon that took Eustace to the stratosphere was then inflated with helium, and Eustace was hooked up in place to it. Unlike Felix Baumgartner, Eustace wasn't in a capsule. He was directly attached to a module held by the balloon.
Eustace ascended into the stratosphere at a rate of about a thousand feet per minute. Which means it took over two hours for him to reach his final altitude of just over 135,000 feet. Once he reached the final altitude, he actually just spent about 30 minutes floating above the Earth enjoying the view.
"I can see the curvature of the Earth and the darkness of space and it's really awesome!" Eustace proclaimed from 135,908 feet.
After enjoying the view, Eustace detached himself and went into free-fall. In less than two minutes, he was experiencing weightlessness and falling so fast that he broke the sound barrier. He stabilized the free fall using a small drogue chute.
At 18,000 feet, he deployed his full parachute, and spent the next fifteen minutes falling to Earth. Shortly after landing, a recovery team helped him remove the bulky space suit and he traveled back to the launch site.
This isn't the end of the story, though, as neither Paragon nor Eustace were interested in pursuing this space jump for the sake of a space jump. The technology developed for this project will be used for other projects, as well.
One such project is World View Experience, a spinoff company from Paragon which is developing a large scale capsule and balloon system to take tourists up to the stratosphere and see the curvature of the Earth. (While enjoying cocktails.)
"The technology itself, method of recovery, and everything else is applicable to anything you want to do in the stratosphere," Anderson told me. "It’s not just World View's business, but Paragon's as well with the word we do for space, undersea, and other extreme environments."
Check out a video of the record-breaking jump below:
StratEx Record Setting Space Dive from Atomic Entertainment Group LLC on Vimeo.
