Skydiving Too Pedestrian? Try Spacediving!
E365> Spacediving - Friday January 04 2008
E365 -- When we first came across this story, we thought it was either fiction or someone's pipe dream. Half the problem was that the source was a blog, the other half was the subject matter. We've seen enough movies to know that things burn up while entering our atmosphere, making "spacediving" an exclusive sport reserved for the suicidal.
Well, we did a little research, and it seems there may be some substance behind this story after all.
Originally devised as a means for astronaughts to get back to Earth in the case of an emergency, the idea of spacediving was first proposed by General Electric the early 60s (pictured above). Called MOOSE, for Man Out of Space Easiest, the idea called for an astronaut to get into a foam-filled bag, fire thrusters to get it to re-enter the atmosphere, and hope that both the ablative heat shield and the parachute worked.
"You wouldn't want to try something like this unless there was no way at all of landing in the disabled spaceship and the astronaut just had to bail out in space," MOOSE project chief John Quillinan told a Philadelphia newspaper, The Evening Bulletin, at the time.
But just as people were rubbishing the idea, Captain Joseph Kittinger came along, and voluntarily jumped out of a balloon at nearly 103,000 feet (31,395 meters) to free fall from more than four and a half minutes. It was a revelation. Once people knew it could be done from that height, what was to stop them going higher?
Of course, what most people don't talk about was the fact that his first attempt almost ended in disaster when an equipment malfunction caused him to lose consciousness. An automatic parachute saved his life, but he was in a rotational spin for a good part of the free fall, with the g-force at his extremities over 22 times that of gravity (well trained pilots tend to pass out at 10).
Thankfully, technology has brought us a long way since the 60s, and at least one intrepid company is seriously investigating the idea of spacediving.
The Canadian Arrow is proposing the possibility of taking 60-second rocket flights to the edge of space, jumping out wearing nothing more than counter pressure suit and hopefully landing safely on terra firma.
Now, that is extreme!
 FURTHER SURFIN' |
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| EXTREME INSPIRATION |
| "Man, an animal that makes bargains."
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