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

Stratospheric Skydiving: Opening the Door to Civilian Space Travel

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first time you think of something in a totally new way, says Alan Eustace, people will think you're crazy. And in all likelihood, they'll react negatively, "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."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ALAN EUSTACE :

Alan Eustace leapt to Earth from the edge of the stratosphere wearing only a spacesuit, shattering skydiving records and potentially revolutionizing the commercial space industry. In a custom 500-pound spacesuit, Eustace was strapped to a weather balloon, and rose to a height of over 135,000 feet, where he dove to Earth at speeds exceeding 821 mph -- breaking both the sound barrier and previous records for high-altitude jumps.

Leading up to this jump, Eustace and his partners in StratEx had spent years solving a key problem of stratosphere exploration: returning human beings to Earth from the edge of space using minimal life-support systems. In the process, they’ve opened the door to cheaper and safer near-space travel.

Previously, Eustace was Google's senior vice president of search, and engineering. Prior to Google, he spent 15 years at Digital/Compaq/HP's Western Research Laboratory where he worked on a variety of chip design and architecture projects, including the MicroTitan Floating Point unit, the fastest microprocessor of its era.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Alan Eustace:  Well, I was a skydiver before I was a computer scientists so I started skydiving when I turn 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 skydiver 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 and so for that I got requalified in skydiving and then it's a long story but I ended up deciding to try a stratospheric skydive as well.

The key inside 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 safest or the cheapest way to get into the stratosphere. And 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 and 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 vehicle activity suits for the Space Shuttle, International Space Station, American astronauts, so they had a lot of experience of 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. And 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 and 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 so 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...

For the full transcript, check out