Stratospheric Skydiving: Opening the Door to Civilian Space Travel | Alan Eustace | Big Think

Well, I was a skydiver before I was a computer scientist. So I started skydiving when I turned 18, and I wrote my first computer program probably when I was 19. So the order is definitely skydiving, then computer science.

But I skydived for a very long time. I've obviously worked in the technology field for a long time. I had pretty much given up skydiving at one point when I moved out to California in 1984 and didn't make another skydive for a very long time. Meanwhile, I started flying airplanes and working in technology companies, working on management.

And it wasn't until maybe six or seven years ago that I got the bug to skydive again. For that, I got requalified in skydiving. Then, it's a long story, but I ended up deciding to try a stratospheric skydive as well. The key insight that I think I had and that the team had was trying to build a capsule, a large capsule, maybe pressurized, maybe not, with lots of the infrastructure for going up was not the best way to accomplish what we were trying to accomplish.

It was also not necessarily the safest or the cheapest way to get into the stratosphere. For us, we wanted to take the analogy of scuba diving; that if you're a scuba diver, you take exactly what you need with you and nothing else underneath the water. We wanted to find a stratosphere equivalent. And so that's where we built scuba diving for the stratosphere.

The suit was designed by ILC Dover. They built all the Apollo suits. They build all of the extra vehicular activity suits for the Space Shuttle, International Space Station, American astronauts, so they had a lot of experience building space suits. The challenge in this case was they were doing a lot of things that they had never done before.

First, they had never worked with a private citizen on a project; they were used to these very long government programs that take years and years even to get the approval to move to the next step. Here, they were acting like a startup company. They built a suit from scratch to deployment and testing probably in a period of a year or two.

That probably is about the same time that they had to put a proposal for something else. It was the first suit that had been certified from scratch and put into production in probably 30 years, so it was a big undertaking for them to do. As far as the technology for the suit, no suit had ever been heated; before, it had only been cooled.

This suit had an internal frame that was used to support the quiven module. It had to have thermal connections between it; the suit architecture was very different because we wanted to make sure that there was no fogging, and we also needed to guarantee that we would use the minimum amount of oxygen.

So normally, these systems flood oxygen by you, and they don't have to worry about carbon dioxide, but we wanted to use much less oxygen, and we wanted to eliminate the possibility that you would end up with any kind of moisture or freezing on the faceplate. So we had to design an entirely new architecture, and they were fantastic.

We had five airplane jumps where we got used to flying the suit and learned a little bit about how to control the suit in free fall. We followed that up with three balloon jumps: first from 57,000 feet, the second one 105,000 feet, and the third was a record jump from 135,890 feet.

The speeds that we acquired during that jump broke mock one in about 37 seconds of that free fall, and we reached our highest speed of 822 miles an hour in about 51 seconds. I mean, the problems with the capsule are they're a bit complicated; they're heavy, which requires a very, very large balloon to be able to lift them.

So, because the balloon is so large, it actually requires a different launch technique to use. By making the system a lot smaller and a lot lighter, you could use a much smaller balloon, and then in turn, the smaller balloon allows you to use a much simpler and I think safer launch system.

At the start, we had a lot going for us. The second thing is the interconnection between the balloon and the skydiver has caused issues in the past. In a previous attempt, for instance, somebody was unable to disconnect the oxygen and therefore had to ride down with the balloon, and it was a harrowing experience.

When Joe Kittinger, in 1960, tried to get out of his balloon, he had trouble getting out of the seat. So there were lots of different issues associated with capsules. The other really bad thing about a capsule is if you're depending on the ship's oxygen for most of the trip, and you're just going to have what's called a bail-out bottle of oxygen, as soon as you disconnect from that capsule, the time is set.

You have exactly maybe 15 minutes to get into breathable air, or you're going to die. The nice piece about a scuba-like system is that I have five hours of oxygen, so there's nothing compelling for me to get out, disconnect, and get down right away. I have lots of time.

So if the parachute opens high, that's not an issue. There are a lot of safety aspects that come into this particular design; a lot of redundancies that came into this design to make it much safer on a lot of different dimensions.

How do you look at a problem area and try and understand whether the approach that's always been taken is the right one or not? I think the biggest thing for me is you kind of try to go back to first principles: what is the problem that you're trying to solve?

Don't look at every other solution in that space, but look at solutions in other spaces around it and try to figure out parallels. In my case, what I wanted to do was be able to explore the stratosphere. I wanted to be up in the stratosphere, and I wanted to be able to do anything once I'm in the stratosphere.

So a capsule idea doesn't really get you – it's hard to get the capsule up in the stratosphere; it's complicated. But the main issue is it doesn't allow me to do anything that I want in the stratosphere. So let's say I wanted to take a balloon trip and then come back down with the balloon.

Well, if I build a capsule, then I have to have a whole different capsule designed for going up and coming down. Or let's say I suddenly decided I wanted to go up in a sailplane. There's some fabulous efforts right now to see if you can use, you know, around the Andes and even in South America these polar lifts that they think might be able to allow a sailplane to get up to maybe 100,000 feet.

So if I got this capsule, well, now I want to use a sailplane, so I have to start over because I have to combine building an aircraft and a life support system. But let's imagine separating those two. Let's say I'm just going to build a life support system, then I can conceivably just go into any sailplane and be able to do that.

So the key for me is to step away from it, look at the problem you're trying to solve, and then start looking at all the possible solutions for that class of problem in all the domains that are around it. If you do that, you'll often find insights that make the problem that used to be incredibly complex and incredibly expensive.

You can find a different approach that might be a lot cheaper; it might be a lot easier; it might be a lot safer; it might cost a lot less. But the issue is when you first come up with it, people are going to kind of think you're crazy. Because the first time you ever think about something in a totally new domain, the initial reaction is always going to be negative.

Not because the people don't love you, not because they don't care about you, but because nobody has seen this problem in that dimension. And they'll continue for a while. Then there's this moment, which I love, which is when something goes from the impossible to the inevitable.

So it's that moment of impossible to inevitable. In many technologies, that swap happens not over 20 years, but over a month, and that's what excites me.