On May 8, 2013, Alan Eustace, then the 56-year-old senior vice president of knowledge at Google, jumped from an airplane18,000 feet above the desert in Coolidge, Arizona. Anyone watching would have witnessed an odd sight: Eustace was wearing a bulky white space suit—the kind nasa astronauts wear. He looked like a free-falling Michelin Man.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.
Through his giant space helmet and oxygen mask, Eustace could see the ground stretched out for miles. But the view wasn’t his main concern. He hadn’t quite worked out how to control the space suit, which, unlike a typical skydiving suit, weighed about 265 pounds and was pumped full of pressurized air. Eustace, an experienced skydiver, knew how to shift his body to change direction or to stop himself from spinning—a problem that, if uncorrected, can lead to blackout, then death. But when he started to rotate—slowly at first, then faster and faster—his attempts to steady himself just made things worse. He felt like he was bouncing around inside a concrete box.
At 10,000 feet, Eustace pulled a cord to open his parachute. Nothing happened. Then he tried a backup cord. That one didn’t work either. Eustace knew better than to panic: Three safety divers had jumped with him to monitor his fall. Within seconds, one of the divers reached across Eustace and yanked open the main chute.
All Eustace had to do now was depressurize his suit, which would deflate it and allow him to steer himself toward the landing area. He reached for a dial on the side of the suit and turned it. Nothing happened. With the suit still pressurized, Eustace couldn’t extend his arms overhead to grab the handles that controlled the chute. He began slowly drifting off course. Soon he lost sight of the safety divers. He tried to radio for help, but got no response. He now had a more pressing problem: As he approached the ground, he saw that he was headed straight for a giant saguaro cactus. Unable to maneuver his chute, he leaned as far to the right as he could and just managed to avoid the cactus, instead landing headfirst in the sand.
At 10,000 feet, Eustace pulled a cord to open his parachute. Nothing happened. Then he tried a backup cord. That one didn’t work either. Eustace knew better than to panic: Three safety divers had jumped with him to monitor his fall. Within seconds, one of the divers reached across Eustace and yanked open the main chute.
All Eustace had to do now was depressurize his suit, which would deflate it and allow him to steer himself toward the landing area. He reached for a dial on the side of the suit and turned it. Nothing happened. With the suit still pressurized, Eustace couldn’t extend his arms overhead to grab the handles that controlled the chute. He began slowly drifting off course. Soon he lost sight of the safety divers. He tried to radio for help, but got no response. He now had a more pressing problem: As he approached the ground, he saw that he was headed straight for a giant saguaro cactus. Unable to maneuver his chute, he leaned as far to the right as he could and just managed to avoid the cactus, instead landing headfirst in the sand.
of the space suit in action (Daniel Blignaut)
The sun beat down as Eustace lay by the cactus, watching the meter on his oxygen tank.
Twelve minutes and what felt like an eternity later, he heard the sound of an approaching helicopter. Oh good, he thought, relaxing. I’m nowhere near dead.
Which was fortunate, because this was only a practice round. What Eustace was gearing up for was something much more dangerous: a jump from seven and a half times the altitude, the highest ever attempted. A skydive from the edge of space.
The whole thing began innocently enough. Eustace was sitting in his office at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, one day in late 2008 when his boss Sergey Brin dropped by. Brin knew Eustace had skydived recreationally in the past, and wanted to know whether he thought it would be possible for someone to jump out of a Gulfstream, a large, expensive private jet that Brin sometimes used.
Eustace wasn’t a jet pilot, or a professional daredevil. He was an engineer from Florida who had designed computer-processing units for 15 years in Palo Alto before Larry Page persuaded him to join his growing company over breakfast one morning in 2002. Eustace hadn’t been skydiving in 26 years, but the idea intrigued him: He wasn’t convinced that the skeptics were right. As an engineer, he preferred to approach a problem from first principles. If it was impossible, why? What was the trajectory of the exhaust? Would the FAA grant approval to open the door mid-flight, which would require circumventing the user manual?
Eustace spent the next few months trying to answer these questions, in between projects that demanded his more immediate attention. He eventually lined up a skydiver to try a jump out of a Cessna Caravan, another high-speed aircraft. Luckily, the skydiver landed without incident. What’s more, he filmed himself. When Eustace brought Brin the footage, Brin seemed surprised that he had followed up. But by this point, Eustace was hooked—and he was starting to consider trying the jump himself. All he’d have to do was get reacquainted with the equipment and do a couple of test jumps.
In August 2010, Eustace took a few days off and went down to the suburbs of Los Angeles, where he did six practice jumps with an instructor, a professional stunt skydiver named Luigi Cani. The two hit it off—Cani was warm and friendly, and seemed up for anything. He loved the Gulfstream idea.
A few months later, Eustace was back home in Mountain View when his phone rang. It was Cani. He wanted to know whether Eustace had heard about a guy named Felix Baumgartner, who was after an even bigger challenge: He was trying to beat the high-altitude-skydiving record with a jump from the upper reaches of the stratosphere, more than 100,000 feet in the air. Cani had found a sponsor to launch a competing effort, and wondered whether Eustace could advise him on the type of equipment he’d need.
Eustace was delighted. He was sure Baumgartner was way ahead—he had backing from the energy-drink company Red Bull, which had hired more than three dozen team members with backgrounds in nasa, the Air Force, and the aerospace industry—but he liked Cani, and wanted to see him create some healthy competition. He agreed to help in any way he could. But before Cani’s effort could kick off, his funding fell through.
Eustace considered this news. He led a quiet, comfortable life. He wasn’t after publicity or adrenaline. But this was the engineering challenge of a lifetime. Forget the Gulfstream. He could attempt the stratosphere jump himself, and fund it with his own savings. He thought for a few months and called Cani to ask for his blessing. Cani laughed, amused. Go for it, he said.
The atmosphere is divided into five layers. The higher you go, the thinner the air, until eventually you hit outer space. The layer closest to Earth, the troposphere, is where weather occurs. The next layer, between 33,000 and 160,000 feet above sea level, is the stratosphere. It marks the beginning of what’s known as “near space”—the threshold between the planet we experience on the ground and the mysteries of the universe beyond.
nasa would soon send a man into orbit, and ambitions would turn to the moon. The expansion of the space program coincided with a series of catastrophic balloon accidents, and exploration into the stratosphere was largely abandoned.
That is, until 2010, when Baumgartner announced that he was going after Kittinger’s record, with the backing of none other than Kittinger himself—plus a hefty sponsorship from Red Bull. Plenty of people had contacted Kittinger over the years, wanting him to help them break the record, but Baumgartner was the first to come with a sound scientific support system, courtesy of Red Bull’s team of professionals. The effort, amplified by Baumgartner’s high-octane personal life, attracted a lot of press.
Eustace was an unlikely competitor. The son of an aerospace engineer for Martin Marietta (a forerunner of Lockheed Martin), Eustace had grown up loving planes, but his first time jumping out of one—18 years old, dragged along by his best friend—he felt less exhilaration than ambivalence. The equipment was primitive—coveralls, thick boots, military-grade parachutes—and Eustace landed hard. The experience was a blur. He didn’t know whether he’d done it right, and he certainly didn’t plan to do it again.
Then the instructor handed him his evaluation. His friend’s jump was terrible, but the instructor had deemed Eustace’s “perfect.” So when his friend wanted to go back a week later, Eustace went along. He enjoyed it much more the second time: He was less nervous, and could actually remember what he had done. He went again, and again, and after his 10th jump, he invested in a higher-performance parachute. Then he mastered a stand-up landing, instead of a drop-and-roll. He learned to dive, swoop, somersault, slow down, and speed up, until skydiving became less like falling than like flying.
The list of things that can go wrong when parachuting from extreme heights is nearly endless. The stratosphere is cold, for one—the temperature can reach more than 100 degrees below zero. The air is also about 1,000 times thinner than at sea level, which means that without a pressurized suit, bodily fluids start to boil, creating gas bubbles that lead to mass swelling.
But gondolas present their own risks. In 1962, a Soviet air-force colonel named Pyotr Dolgov hit his head on the side of his gondola when he jumped from almost 94,000 feet, cracking the visor of his helmet and accidentally depressurizing his suit. He died before he hit the ground. A few years later, an amateur skydiver from New Jersey named Nick Piantanida was unable to switch from the oxygen supply in the gondola to the one attached to his suit when he reached his intended jump height of 123,500 feet, and had to abort the trip. (An unknown equipment malfunction on his next attempt would be fatal.)
Gondolas are also heavy. Baumgartner’s team was using one that weighed almost 3,000 pounds. Ditching the gondola not only would be safer, Eustace figured, but would also allow him to start his jump from a greater height.
But nobody had ever attempted a stratosphere jump without one. If Eustace was going to rise 26 miles into the air attached to nothing but a helium balloon, he’d need a suit that would provide the same environmental protections—oxygen, instruments, climate control—that a gondola would. In short, he would need a space suit. The problem was that no one had designed or flown a new space suit in about 40 years. nasa has been using essentially the same version of the Apollo suit since the 1970s—and Eustace couldn’t just borrow one of those. He needed a suit that could survive a slow ascent into the stratosphere and a fast descent, with swift changes in temperature and velocity, and that could also support the weight of a giant parachute.
Eustace began to dedicate his nights and weekends to thinking about the design. He was still working 80-hour weeks at Google, but he had a lot of vacation time saved up, and his bosses—Brin and Page—were encouraging. A saying inside the company was that employees should have “a healthy disrespect for the impossible.”
Eustace’s wife, Kathy Kwan, was less enthusiastic. The couple had two daughters, 11 and 16, and she knew the history of the sport. Eustace was so engrossed in the technological challenges that the possibility of death didn’t really enter his mind—any risk, he thought, could be mitigated by enough advance preparation. The couple made an uneasy truce: Kwan would support Eustace’s project, and he would avoid bringing it up—no stratosphere talk at the dinner table. (Kwan politely declined to speak with me, saying she preferred not to dredge up those particular memories.)
In October 2011, a contact in the aviation industry connected Eustace with a married couple named Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter, co-founders of Paragon Space Development. MacCallum and Poynter had been two of the eight crew members on the famous Biosphere 2 project of the early ’90s, living in a sealed artificial world for two years to determine whether humans could survive in closed ecosystems beyond Earth. They had started Paragon to create biological and chemical life-support systems for hazardous environments, like the deep sea and outer space.
The couple was used to getting calls from people asking all kinds of crazy things: Can you fly me into space? Would it be possible to strap me to a rocket? But this was the first time they’d heard anyone propose a stratosphere jump without a capsule. MacCallum was intrigued enough to set up a call with Eustace, and the two spoke for more than an hour. A week later, Eustace flew down to Paragon’s headquarters, in Tucson, Arizona, and spent a day presenting his idea.
MacCallum and Poynter soon agreed to lead Eustace’s engineering team. They gathered the company’s leading engineers, mechanics, and flight operators to work on the design, and commissioned ILC Dover—the same manufacturing company that makes nasa’s suits—to build a prototype.
Eustace soon began making regular trips to Tucson for testing. The team put the suit in a wind tunnel and a vacuum chamber to determine how it would hold up in free fall. They hung Eustace from a nylon strap and spun him around so he could practice operating his equipment in midair. Next came a series of thermal tests, to ensure the suit could handle subzero temperatures. Eustace was suspended inside a sealed, liquid-nitrogen-cooled chamber for five hours at a time. Small tubes in the suit were supposed to circulate hot water around his limbs and chest to keep him warm. But the tubes ended at the wrists, meaning that, even with a pair of electrically heated mountain-climbing gloves, Eustace’s hands eventually began to freeze. The team gave him a pair of oven mitts to wear on top of the gloves.
The team tried to fix the problem by introducing a drogue—a round parachute about six feet across that is supposed to add stability. The Coolidge jump, in May 2013, was Eustace’s first chance to test the equipment himself. While nearly everything went wrong, the biggest problem remained spin. Eustace began spinning almost immediately after he left the plane, even with the drogue, and the suit was too rigid to allow him to correct himself midair the way he would during a skydive from a lower altitude.
After the Coolidge jump, the team decided to raise the attachment point of the drogue, moving it from the seat of the suit to the back of the neck. That would make Eustace fall at a slight angle, and therefore not spin. To keep his arms from getting tangled up in the strings when the chute deployed, the engineers added a boom that would extend when the drogue opened and keep it at a safe distance from the suit. They called the system saeber.
When the team tested the system on ida from 120,000 feet, her spinning slowed from 400 rpm to 22 rpm, a gentle pirouette. Eustace did more practice jumps, learning to stick out his elbows to correct himself in midair. They were finally ready.
Eustace woke up well before dawn on Friday, October 24, 2014, in a tin shed on an unused strip of land next to the airport in Roswell, New Mexico—a site that had been chosen for its open space and relatively few cacti. The weather was perfect.
Kwan had chosen to stay home. The girls had school that day—Eustace and Kwan had decided to keep them on their normal schedule—but had been granted permission to bring their phones to class so they could get updates from the launch site. The Paragon team and a single reporter from The New York Times would be the only onlookers.
The team strapped Eustace to a massive helium balloon—525 feet in diameter when fully inflated, roughly the size of a football stadium—and untethered it from the launchpad. Just like that, Eustace was on his way. He felt relaxed, almost drowsy, as the balloon rose above the airport. He worried for a moment that he might fall asleep and miss the jump.
After two hours and seven minutes, Eustace reached 135,890 feet. This was float altitude: The balloon had expanded as far as it could, so he would not rise farther. Ground control would now detach him by remote control. The countdown began. On “zero,” Eustace felt the balloon snap and drift off. For a single moment, he felt like he was hovering in midair. He did a backflip. Then he did another.
Then saeber kicked in, launching the drogue and pushing Eustace into a downward position, facing Earth. The stratosphere was quiet as Eustace began free-falling, but soon he could hear the rush of air inside his helmet. He passed 822 miles an hour, breaking the speed of sound. At about 8,300 feet above the ground—after four minutes and 27 seconds of free fall—Eustace deployed his main parachute. Nine and a half minutes later, he landed with a smile on his face. His team rushed over, barely able to contain the whoops and yeahs. The record was his.
The Times reporter’s story would not run until later that day, and Eustace’s reception was decidedly more muted than Baumgartner’s. After he was freed from the suit, he helped clean up the landing site, check the GoPro footage, and wrap up the parachute. That night, the whole team went to a Mexican restaurant in Roswell. Eustace was on his third margarita when he got a text from his sister, who was at a bar in Florida and, by some cosmic coincidence, had bumped into none other than Joseph Kittinger. Recognizing him, she went up to him and said, “Hey, did you know that my brother just broke your record?” Kittinger congratulated Eustace by phone the next day and invited him to have a beer sometime. Baumgartner, too, released a statement congratulating him.
The next Monday, Eustace was back behind his desk at Google.
Last December, Eustace’s suit was put on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia. In the two and a half years since the jump, Eustace has given countless talks about the suit—at nasa, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SpaceX. But most people still don’t know that Eustace broke Baumgartner’s record. “If someone says, ‘Hey, this is the guy who holds the record for the highest-altitude jump,’ ” he told me, “people will usually just turn to me and ask, ‘Oh, are you Felix?’ ”
Eustace isn’t planning to go—he feels it would be anticlimactic. He had hoped to venture out in his space suit again, but ultimately decided that another jump would put too much strain on his family. So he takes every other chance he gets to launch himself skyward.
A few years after he started working as an engineer, Eustace bough
t a bright-yellow Lockwood AirCam, a small two-seater with an open cockpit. He took me to see it one blustery afternoon in December, in a private hangar at the San Carlos Airport. We drove there from Eustace’s house in his Tesla, to which he had recently upgraded, at Kwan’s urging, from a 2002 Honda Accord.
We geared up: puffy pants and jackets and heavy helmets. Eustace helped strap me into the back seat, then jumped in the front. After a few radio calls to flight control, we pointed down the runway and took off. The plane lived up to its tagline—slow and low—and at first, it was almost like we were floating in a balloon. But as we got higher, flying over the tops of office buildings, the wind picked up. Although I was wearing gloves, my hands started getting numb. I thought about putting them in my pockets, but didn’t want to let go of the sides of the plane, which I was gripping with all my strength. We rose higher and higher and banked right over the San Francisco Bay. The water glittered below us, the bridge stretching across the horizon.
After about 20 minutes, I heard Eustace’s voice in my ear: “Do you want to take control?” There was a small control stick in front of me, which Eustace had shown me how to use before we took off—a slight pull to go higher, a push sideways to turn. Still holding on to the side of the plane with one hand, I used my other to tilt the stick slightly to the right. The plane tilted to the right. “Oh!,” I said, in genuine surprise, forgetting my fear for a moment. “I’m flying!”
Eustace just laughed. “Go higher!” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment