http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article3416197.eceEven Neil Armstrong would admit it’s a pretty big leap: to bale out of a balloon more than 20 miles above the surface of Earth, on the very edge of space, and let gravity take its course for a hair-raising seven minutes.
But this is what two men are racing to do, the only question being which one will jump first. In one corner is Michel Fournier, a 64-year-old former French paratrooper who has sold his furniture to finance the venture and says he has dedicated his life to making the jump. In the other is Steve Truglia, a former SAS soldier and stuntman from east London who believes the attempt is “the last great stunt left to do; the biggest adventure in the world”.
Whoever manages to make the jump first and survive it will break a world record that has stood for nearly 50 years. They will instantly take their place in the history books for completing the highest freefall as well as becoming the first person to break the sound barrier unaided.
Heard about this on the radio this morning. Nutter!
It will take more than nerve to make the attempt a success: the technical hurdles are massive. At 120,000ft (22.7 miles to be exact) the temperature is about -100C and the air pressure is around 0.002 bar – almost a vacuum. To survive that, Truglia will be wearing a custom-made pressurised spacesuit from the same Russian company that produced Yuri Gagarin’s suit (“how cool is that?”), and he will be carrying his own oxygen.
The suit will be plugged into the life-support system onboard the balloon’s gondola for the ascent, which will keep the pressure constant. It will be unplugged when the time comes to jump, and Truglia will switch to a manual system that he will carry with him in a briefcase-sized box for the descent.
But first he has to get there. The journey into the upper stratosphere will take about 4½ hours with the gondola open to the elements, swinging beneath a huge, helium-filled balloon. Because the balloon’s gas expands as the atmosphere thins, the canvas must also be capable of expanding. “From zero to 120,000ft the balloon will expand 500 times,” says Truglia. “So on the ground it will look like a very long sausage, but up at 120,000ft it will be pumpkin shaped.”
The balloon, which is being custom-made by Andy Elson, the man behind the Breitling Orbiter 2 world circumnavigation attempt by balloon, will be 200ft high, and when fully inflated, 600ft across. “That means you have a huge surface area that isn’t filled as it is rising with a tiny bit of helium in the top, so the slightest breath of wind will put enormous pressure on it.”
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