Where Technology and Stuntmen meet

[dugnsuz (Doug)]

Fantastic talk about the way technology has transformed the work of the stunt artist on movies.And this amazing upcoming "Space Jump"...Wow!!!!! Hope he does it!


http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_trugl..._of_space.html

Doug

[multiweb (Marc)]

Cool stuff! This one did it a long while ago. Not many people heard about this bloke either. They only remember neal armstrong. That's the one he's talking about.

[koputai (Jason)]

Interesting guy, and a great talk.

This is a favourite subject of mine, and I've got a decent library on these jumps, and stratospheric ballooning.
Since Joe Kittinger did it, and Nick Piantinida did it a few years later but died, there's been an untold number of guys like this bloke talk themselves up about doing it. There's at least four blokes in the planning/testing/training stages right now, and one of them is Australian.
Will any of them even put in a true attempt? Maybe. Will anyone succeed, yes probably, one day. Will people die? Yes.

Two of my favourite books on this are:

"The Pre-Astronauts - Manned Ballooning on the Theshold of Space"

and

"Magnificent Failure - Freefall from the Edge of Space", both by Craig Ryan.

The latter is a very detailed account of Nick Piantinida's three jumps, and his ultimate demise. A very sad story, but extraordinarily interesting. It gives a fantastic insight into the mind of a person like him, and his drive and ambition. They are utterly selfish people, but what a boring world we would live in if not for people like Nick Piantinida.

Cheers,
Jason.

[GrahamL]

What do you know about stargazer flights jason ?

I 've looked before and cant seem to find much info .. the notion of takeing a scope up to this height and having a look around would be a lot of fun especialy without the lets jump out plan.

[koputai (Jason)]

A little bit, what do you want to know?
Most of the astronomy flights were done by the US Navy. Stargazer carried a 12.5 inch telescope mounted on top of the gondola, and it had some sort of star traking mechanism, though I'm not sure how it worked. Previous to Stargazer, there were the Stratoscope flights. Stratoscope I was unmanned and carried a 12 inch reflector, and Stratoscope II carried a 36 inch reflector, made especially for infra-red observation of Mars.

Cheers,
Jason.

[GrahamL]

ok thats already more than I can find on the net

I guess what did they see , or what were there goals ?

[koputai (Jason)]

Craig Ryan has a new book out next week about Joe Kittinger, "Come Up and Get Me". Kittinger was one of the main drivers behind the Stargazer series as he thought the astronomy that could be done was worth doing the flights, so this book will probably provide more detail.
From "The Pre-Astronauts", the goals of Stargazer were:
1. To measure atmospheric turbulence
2. To measure star brightness variations caused by high-altitude turbulence; and
3. To reveal how water vapour in the air affects light emanating from planets and stars.

It doesn't sound like much of a goal, considering the size of the project, but the goals were scaled back due to a lot of balloon and other equipment failures during the early unmanned Stargazer flights. The astrolab flown on Stargazer weighed well over two tonnes! That's a lot of weight under a balloon.

The earlier Stratoscope payload was over 3 tonnes!

Cheers,
Jason.

[kinetic (Steve)]

Fascinating stuff guys, thanks Doug and Jason.
He seems like such a genuine, nice guy. I hope it goes well.

Steve

[Jen]

120,000 feet high

[Ric]

That will be one awesome jump

[dugnsuz (Doug)]

What's up with the stains on his T-Shirt though!??

Sorry, couldn't resist!
Doug