Australian ex-commando Rodd Millner announced last week his plans to beat the record set by Chuck Yeager many years ago. Millner is fearlessly rehearsing to travel faster than the speed of sound, but without the airplane. In so doing, he will be the only person to freefall back to Earth from the edge of space, and hopefully live to talk about it.
Rodd Millner is an experienced skydiver, speedboat racer, scuba diver, and insurance salesman. Call him a courageous adventurist or a crazed lunatic, his outcome will likely be the defining headline.
The good humored, and seemingly sane thirty-six year old is beginning nine-months of training, practicing hundreds of increasingly higher jumps. Why? “Because it can be done,” said Millner. “The questions just starting coming to me, like how high can a balloon go? And then I wondered if I could skydive down from there!”
The balloon will be gigantic. To lift Millner and his equipment to 130,000 feet above sea level, it must be 426 feet across—two jumbo jets could easily fit inside end-to-end—and 295 feet tall. Completely inflated, it will contain 12 million cubic feet of helium and weigh one ton. The jumping off altitude is 4 times higher than commercial airlines fly. The balloon will be visible by the naked eye from ground level even at maximum altitude.
Millner will begin with “clean skin” practice jumps for the lower altitudes. The Space Jump Team will gradually increase the equipment he carries including a specially designed space suit. In this way, problems will be identified and corrected before the actual event.
Much can go wrong in either direction. The two and one half hour ride up in the balloon will start from an Australian Defense Force (ADF) launch facility, Alice Springs, in central Australia. The solo descent will last about ten minutes.
The balloon is being constructed of expandable plastic attach to a small gondola. It will rise to the absolute ceiling on the world where air stops and the vacuum of space begins. There the unattended balloon would remain indefinitely. To remedy this, a remote control signal will later deflate the balloon and parachutes return the gondola, somewhere.
Millner’s freefall will pass through several layers of the atmosphere. The most difficult may be the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere (40,000 to 52,000 feet). There the temperature will be –80·C (or –112·F); any unprotected part of the body would freeze instantly. His three-layered suit must also adjust the internal pressure and oxygen mixture as he descends to one-atmosphere.
U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger, wearing a pressurized suit, successfully jumped from a balloon at 102,000 feet in 1960. He didn’t break the sound barrier. But the speed of sound varies with altitude and temperature. Millner will accelerate as he falls, reaching a minimum of 660 miles per hour at around 80,000 feet.
Will he outrace sound? “Yes,” says Millner. “It should be a really smooth transition. Because the atmosphere is so thin up there, there’s no resistance to slow me down until I get into the thicker air. We’re taking the human body where its never been before.” His top speed should be between 994 – 1118 miles per hour.
Millner’s small size, relative to an airplane, will not generate a sonic boom, the audible shock wave of an object that moves faster than the sound it propagates. But some expect to hear something that may resemble a loud pop, like a cork from a bottle.
Project Director, Walt Missingham, of the Space Jump Team refused to discuss the funding sources for this multi-million dollar experiment, except to credit Becker Entertainment for a 70mm film format and high definition video tape process they will be using. Millner’s specially designed suit will be equipped with several cameras, and his big dive will be motion filmed from the gondola.
A team of filming-skydivers will join Millner from a Lear Jet at 40,000 feet and another team jumping off from a low-altitude airplane at 10,000 feet. Additional film crews will be positioned in hot air balloons at 10,000, 20,000 and 30,000 feet. Needless to say, numerous long-lensed ground cameras will be focused upon this spectacle in March 2002.
The intrepid Aussie will communicate with his team by radio before and
during his fall, opening his parachute at 5000 feet, where he’s expecting
to slow to 120mph. He will steer with his body and attempt to land within 50
feet of the launch site. “But,” says Rodd Millner, “I’ll be
basically aiming for the planet Earth.”