When you did reach 135,000 feet, how long did you linger? It’s just a multi-layered view of what the world looks like. You look down and you see patches of fog. As you get higher, you see how light diffuses through the different layers of the atmosphere. You start seeing the curvature of the Earth and the darkness of space. You see every perspective, from the ground all the way up through normal airliner altitudes, to above airliner altitudes. The balloon was making really slow and predictable turns that would allow you to gaze out in pretty much any direction. There’s no elevator feeling because you are not accelerating. It’s very different from an aircraft in that it goes up at almost exactly 1000 feet per minute, from the ground all the way up to 135,000 feet. You’re perfectly balanced it’s perfectly quiet there’s no vibration as you’re going up. I watched the video of the takeoff, and it looks like it was fairly smooth.īalloons are a beautiful mechanism for taking off. You can turn your wrists right and left really easily but as far as squeezing the glove, that’s much harder. It’s all based on bearings, so to move in a particular direction, your arm turns one direction and then a second direction. The breathing is kind of noisy, and when you’re not breathing it’s eerily quiet. The life support system was essentially the suit that you were wearing. That’s a fun side effect of records-you get to meet your childhood heroes. Breaking a record has been nice: I just had dinner with Joe Kittinger and my mom. But it was really more about building a life support system to explore the stratosphere. Were you attracted to the idea of setting a record? This project ended up being the nexus of all three. Popular Science: Why did you want to do this jump?Īlan Eustace: I’m a pilot and a skydiver and an engineer. He just may prove to be the man who ushered in the era of balloon-based space tourism. We spoke with Eustace about his record-setting experience and his legacy as a space explorer. Some of the people who helped Eustace pull off this feat started a company, called World View Experience, to take customers to near space via balloon. On the way down Eustace broke the sound barrier and reached a blistering 822 mph. He was lifted into the stratosphere by a massive helium-filled balloon, protected by only a spacesuit, and after drifting for a few minutes released his ride. Last year, Alan Eustace, a computer scientist who previously worked for Google, made history with the world’s highest freefall - a plunge from 135,890 feet.
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