space jumping
Another interesting article from the Canadian newspaper (and website) The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080523.wcheney24/BNStory/National/home
No diversions! No mistakes! Rien!
PETER CHENEY
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
May 24, 2008 at 1:43 AM EDT
NORTH BATTLEFORD, SASK. —
A few locals wondered this week as a bullet-shaped white capsule was unloaded at a steel hangar on the edge of town. Nearby, the prongs of a portable aluminum antenna jutted into the sky, as if someone were waiting for a call from outer space. And, a few days later, a diesel semi-trailer arrived, loaded with nine giant cylinders that looked like Godzilla's scuba tanks.
Perhaps even stranger was the scene over at the North Battleford casino, where every night an exotic visitor from the south of France commanded a table at the Gold Eagle restaurant. As a small army of experts and assistants jotted down engineering equations on napkins and carried on intense technical discussions in perfect, Parisian-inflected French, Michel Fournier, a.k.a. Monsieur Mach One, was at the centre of it all. A compact, suntanned dynamo of a man, he had come to this farming centre to break the world free-fall skydiving record.
Today, weather permitting, Mr. Fournier will put on a specially designed spacesuit, board a phone-booth-sized capsule connected to a giant helium balloon and climb to 130,000 feet – more than four times the height of Mount Everest. There, on the threshold of space, he will make some final checks, then step out the door to begin a 71/2-minute free fall that will accelerate him to more than 1,500 kilometres an hour. If all goes well, he will land, get some high-paid speaking gigs and take his place in aviation history.
Or he could die. But this is not a possibility he is willing to entertain.
“To me, the jump is normal,” says Mr. Fournier, who runs 15 kilometres every day at the age of 64. “Amazing, yes. But it can be done. There is no reason why not. And I am ready.”
HOW TO BE UNBEATABLE
If he succeeds, Mr. Fournier will become the skydiving equivalent of Sir Edmund Hillary, setting a record that may be equalled, but not bested. “No one can go higher,” he says.
He's right, at least for now, since his planned jump altitude represents the outer limit of helium balloon performance. (Although rockets can go higher, they are not a viable skydiving platform because the jumper would be going the same speed as the rocket and burn up while travelling through the atmosphere, like a space shuttle stripped of its protective tiles.)
Leaping from the edge of space is not a casual matter. By 15,000 feet, most humans pass out from a lack of oxygen. If you reach 62,000 feet without a pressurized spacesuit, the blood will boil in your veins because the atmospheric pressure is so low. The temperature can drop to minus 65 Celsius.
THE PERSONAL COST
For Mr. Fournier, none of these are showstoppers. “You have to plan,” he says. “You have to prepare.”
That is an understatement. Mr. Fournier has spent more than 15 years and an estimated $12-million on his high-altitude skydiving quest, which he has dubbed Le Grand Saut (“ En anglais, Le Super Jump,” he notes).
The personal costs have been considerable. Mr. Fournier, who lives on his French military pension, has sold everything he owns, including his furniture, an antique weapons collection and the Provence villa he built for his retirement.
He spends his time fundraising and following his unique training regimen, which includes repetitive skydives, running, yoga, sessions in a low-pressure chamber and hours spent staring at a single point on the wall, to help him develop the mental focus he will need during his long balloon ride into the stratosphere.
“I have to be like steel!” he says, “No diversions! No mistakes! Rien!”
Mr. Fournier originally planned to do the jump in his native France, but after authorities said no, citing safety concerns, he went looking for a new location. He found permission to jump and an ideal setting in North Battleford: an airport that was built as a Second World War training base, but now goes days at a time without seeing an airplane, surrounded by empty prairie.
“It's perfect,” he says. “Perfect.”
Mr. Fournier arrived here two weeks ago, accompanied by his second wife, Kim Schultz, who was born and raised nearby in the small town of Wilkie. The two met in 2003, on one of Mr. Fournier's two previous record attempts (he was forced to abort both when his balloon tore at launch).
Their love story seems as improbable as Mr. Fournier's jump: Ms. Schultz was a clerk at the Best Canadian motel, hated heights and small planes, and spoke English. Mr. Fournier was a daredevil space jumper who lived in Provence and spoke French.
Mr. Fournier reached across the motel desk, took Ms. Schultz's hand, and kissed it. They have been together ever since. At first, they communicated with gestures and calculator-sized translation computers. Now, they have evolved a couple's language that Ms. Schultz calls “Frenglish.” “Love doesn't need a lot of words,” she says. “Silence is golden.”
Marriage to Mr. Fournier has meant material sacrifice, since every penny is devoted to the jump. One year, the couple's heat was cut off when they couldn't pay the bills. To survive, they set up electric heaters and ran an extension cord to a neighbour's home. “I used to have a big house,” Ms. Schultz says. “But being with Michel is better.”
She admires her husband's pioneering spirit: “Neil Armstrong and Thomas Edison pushed things forward,” she says. “And so does Michel. If it wasn't for people like him, we wouldn't be where we are today.”
Over the years, Mr. Fournier has assembled a far-flung network of collaborators and assistants. More than 50 members of his team streamed into North Battleford this week – among them are physicists, engineers, pilots, logisticians and balloon experts from Canada and Brazil.
Mr. Fournier presided over the operation. “We're a team,” he says. “But in the end it's me, alone in the sky.”
THE RECORD SETTER
Only a handful of people have experienced anything remotely close to the jump he has planned. One is Colonel Joseph Kittinger, a retired U.S. Air Force test pilot who made three high-altitude jumps from a helium balloon as part of a program called Project Excelsior. The final jump, in 1960, was from 102,800 feet, a record that stands to this day.
Col. Kittinger came away with an abiding respect for the dangers of high altitude. On a jump from 76,000 feet over the New Mexico desert in 1959, one of his parachutes opened early, wrapped around his neck and choked him unconscious. He plunged downward, spinning at 120 revolutions per minute. At 18,000 feet, a second parachute opened automatically, but wrapped around his body. Col. Kittinger survived only because he had a third parachute, which opened automatically.
‘BEAUTIFUL BUT HOSTILE'
His record-setting 1960 jump also had complications when his right glove failed to pressurize and his hand swelled to twice its normal size (but later recovered). As he rode to altitude in the open basket of his balloon, Col. Kittinger's thoughts were collected on a recorder connected to his space helmet. “Looking out over a very beautiful, beautiful world,” he said into his headset. “Beautiful but hostile. … Absolutely black. Void of anything.”
In the 1960s, a New Jersey truck driver and amateur skydiver named Nick Piantanida tried to break Col. Kittinger's record. On his first attempt, Mr. Piantanida had to bail out when his balloon was ripped apart by wind shear. On the second, he was forced to abort when an oxygen hose jammed. On his final attempt, in 1966, his face mask blew out as his balloon ascended to 57,000 feet. He fell into a coma and died four months later.
“The jump is not the easiest game,” Mr. Fournier says. “But it's my dream.”
Although there are some practical reasons for jumping from the stratosphere – he believes his efforts may somehow contribute to the safety of space shuttle astronauts – the primary motivations are intensely personal.
“For me, the jump is everything,” he says. “I live for it.”
Like Col. Kittinger and Mr. Piantanida, Mr. Fournier has many of the hallmarks of an extreme athlete, including an addiction to the adrenalin rush that comes with surviving intense experiences. Last year, he described his upcoming jump as “seven minutes of dream … the adrenalin goes swoooooo!”
A CRACK PARATROOPER
Mr. Fournier was raised in a small village in southern France. His parents were peasant farmers, and he quit elementary school to help tend the crops and animals. At 18, he joined the French army and became a crack paratrooper, racking up more than 8,500 jumps. By the age of 40, he had an engineering degree and a pilot's licence.
In 1987, he was one of three men chosen by the French Ministry of Defence for a program called Project S-38. The goal was a free-fall jump from 39,000 metres to test the feasibility of a recovery system for a European space shuttle. But two years later, the program was cancelled. Mr. Fournier bought the equipment from the French government, and forged ahead on his own, determined to make a jump 25-per-cent higher than Col. Kittinger's.
After the two failed efforts (in 2002 and 2003), Mr. Fournier's current record attempt is a do-or-die effort. “I would lose my credibility,” he says. “I would lose everything.”
His equipment and techniques are similar to those used by Col. Kittinger nearly 50 years ago: ascent with a helium balloon, the only vehicle (besides a rocket) that can reach more than 100,000 feet; and a pressure suit to supply oxygen and block the cold and intense solar radiation.
Launching a manned helium balloon like Mr. Fournier's involves an intimidating set of risks – starting with the first seconds of the balloon's launch.
If the apparatus fails within the first 1,000 feet of ascent, there won't be enough time for Mr. Fournier to bail out, or for the balloon's parachute system to deploy. The engineers call this low-altitude segment the Dead Zone. “When you've got a human being inside, you think hard about everything you do,” launch director Ricardo Correa says. “There's no margin for error.”
The balloon ride to 130,000 feet will take about 21/2 hours. Then comes the most critical point of the jump: Because the air is so thin, he will not be able to correct his path by manoeuvring his body in the air – if he goes into a spin, he probably won't be able to recover before he blacks out from the force of acceleration. To prevent this, he will exit the capsule by simply leaning forward, since even a minor kick could initiate an unrecoverable tumble.
The physics of a high-altitude jump are completely different from those of conventional skydiving. There is no sensation of falling, and no wind roar, because the air molecules are so far apart that they offer virtually no resistance.
After approximately 15,000 feet, Mr. Fournier will pass the speed of sound. Because the air is so thin, there will be no sonic boom – instead, the only indication will be a rippling shock wave that will pass over his body.
As he falls, the air around him will gradually thicken and slow his descent. He plans to open his parachute about 3,000 feet above the ground. (If the parachute fails, or if he passes out, he has a single backup that will automatically open at 1,000 feet above ground level.) His team estimates he will land within a radius of 40 kilometres.
After he jumps, the capsule will be separated from the balloon by remote control and three parachutes will lower it to the ground. The balloon itself will be punctured by remote control to release the helium, and will then take about 40 minutes to return to Earth; Mr. Fournier will take about 10.
Mr. Fournier will be tracked with both radar and a global positioning system. A helicopter and a Learjet will orbit below him, and recovery teams will be on standby to pick him up as quickly as possible after landing. If he is unconscious when he lands, his team must find him and remove his helmet before his spacesuit's air supply runs out.
As the countdown toward this weekend's jump window continued, Mr. Fournier's crew consulted weather forecasts, checked and repacked parachutes and tested the video cameras installed in the capsule.
The balloon arrived from Russia, packed in a wooden crate large enough to hold a small car. It cost more than $200,000 and is made from Stratofilm, a three-layer quilted plastic that is about one-third as thick as a sheet of Saran wrap.
“This is the one that will do it,” Mr. Fournier says. “My balloon of success.”
Early in the week, the balloon was inspected inside the hangar to keep the wind from catching the material. The floor was covered with clean tarpaulins from a local farm-supply outlet – even a minor tear or abrasion could kill Mr. Fournier. Then the balloon was pulled out of the crate, a shimmering plastic scarf that wound through the building – stretched out straight, it would have covered the distance of two football fields.
INTIMIDATING RISKS
As preparations continued, Mr. Fournier spent time with his wife at the Gold Eagle Lodge, North Battleford's newest and most deluxe hotel. Millions of dollars and a decade and a half of work were at stake, but he seemed unfazed. One afternoon, he explains the technique he will use for the long climb and the intimidating step into 130,000 feet of air: “I think about my breathing,” he said. “When I do that, everything else follows. It's the key to everything.”
Mr. Fournier says he looks forward to being in the sky: “You're not afraid up there,” he says. “You're afraid down here. This is where all the problems are.”
Peter Cheney is a feature writer with The Globe and Mail
