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Jumping from Space 101 JUMPING FROM SPACE 101 ALAN EUSTACE TALKS US INBY ANNETTE O’NEIL o, late in the fall of 2014, you watched Alan Eustace get tugged 25 miles into the stratosphere by a balloon that for all the world looked like a big, white map pin. You checked out the milky curve of a somersaulting Earth through the bare Sbubble of his helmet. You may have even giggled a little bit at what it looks like to land a parachute when you’ve been immobilized into the shape of a gingerbread man. You may have even thought, “That’s just a prohibitively expensive belly jump. I could totally do that.” Okie dokie, armchair astronaut. Before you start calling national space programs with your elevator pitch, let’s talk about what it’s really like to skydive from space. There are precious few people on the planet who can speak from that experience. Luckily, Alan Eustace is happy to tell you all about it. “It was so different from any other skydive I’ve ever done,” he began. “It is hard to even describe. It’s so hard that you can’t even effectively use skydiving as a basis to describe the differences … or find any similarities, for that matter.” YEAH. IT’S LIKE THAT. To start to find a framework, let’s start where Eustace started: in training. Secret training. Eustace and his cohort went to a handful of drop zones to get the job done: Skydive Perris in California and Skydive DeLand in Florida for much of it, then undisclosed locations in Coolidge, Arizona, and Roswell, New Mexico, for the super-secret-squirrel stuff. He and his project partner, friend, instructor, coach and tutor—Daniel “Blikkies” Blignaut—ran the numbers and tested max exit weights to figure out how the canopy flight and landing would work. To do so, they went out as a tandem with Eustace in the back and Blignaut in the front. The pair had a 70-pound bundle in front of them, covered with camouflage. “If anybody ever asked, it was a military-related project,” he said, grinning. “No one ever questioned the fact that we were going out with an exit weight of 550 pounds.” They would have started asking questions, of course, if Eustace had been wearing his space suit. 82 | USPA.ORG | PARACHUTIST | OCTOBER 2019 JUMPING FROM SPACE 101 UNLEARNING EVERYTHING PITCHING AND SPINNING The suit was the key to the entire enter- Right. So: You’re in a claustrophobic suit. prise. In Eustace’s case, this was truer than You’re in Opposite World. Everything is it was for other space-bound freefallers, delayed. Add to that the fact that you’re because he didn’t use a capsule to get to al- pitching up and down the entire time be- titude; there was nothing between him and cause of the drogue system. Eustace said, the void but the suit. (It’s now on display at “We tried a lot of things to dampen that the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virgin- out, but it is just not possible, because ia if you’d like to marvel at it for yourself.) that drogue system is what would keep “In that giant suit, you can’t hear any- you from spinning at 400 rpm if you were thing. You have no feel for the air at all,” unconscious. So, the pitching is definitely Eustace said. “You’re pressurized. All you worth it. All other aspects were in control, hear is the sound of yourself breathing. but we had no way to stop that motion.” I mean, you can hear wind noise, but it is Speaking of spinning: Let’s touch on very muffled. And then, when you try to Eustace’s very favorite part of the jump. do the movements to turn or stop a turn, It was the exit, surprisingly, since it didn’t you find that the control of movements is quite go as planned. The ingenious double 3-ring (that Blig- actually opposite to normal skydiving and naut designed) that attached Eustace to there’s a huge lag. If you want to turn right, the balloon essentially prescribed the exit. you have to put your right hand out. And When mission control initiated the bal- by the time you start to turn, if you pull loon release, the first 3-ring released. As your hand back in, you’ll get a fast turn it released, Eustace dropped. Then, as he going in the other direction. Basically, you dropped, that motion released the other have to unlearn everything.” Alan Eustace waves to the ground crew while a 3-rings. It was designed as a beautiful way The suit itself is no slinky little unitard, balloon lifts him to altitude during one of his test to make sure Eustace released complete- either. According to those in the know, jumps. Photo by Dave Jourdan. ly and totally in exactly the right position, about a third of the pilots who train in a working with the physics of the drogue space suit wash out due to the psycholog- system. (As the drogue-release mechanism ical pressure cooker of simply wearing it. comes into play, it adds a little bit of drag Eustace spent more than 100 hours in it on around Eustace’s neck, causing his upper the ground and during tests, but he readily body to fall just a little slower than his low- admits that he never quite got used to the er body.) challenge presented by it. “On the 105,000-foot test jump, I ba- “You can’t just reach out and grab some- sically went up into an almost-vertical, thing,” he explained. “You’ve got bearings in head-high position,” he said, “and then I your shoulders, in your elbows and around went right back to face to Earth. But on your wrists. To make an even simple move- that final high-altitude jump, I ended up ment requires this complex set of move- doing a totally unexpected slow-motion ments to get the right thing to happen.” backflip. I wasn’t worried about it, because Fine finger movements, as it turns out, the drogue system made entanglement are especially hard. Using them for even impossible, and because Blikkies and I had done backflip exits dozens of times when the simplest movements is like trying to we were doing tandem testing.” do fine needlework while wearing a pair of “What it did was to allow me to see lead-lined arctic mittens. If you’re not care- the balloon for the first time,” Eustace ful, you run out of finger strength before said. “So, as I’m going into freefall, I see you’re anywhere close to your goal. the balloon going over above me as I am “I’m an engineer, so I thought it was falling away from it. And I come by a sec- cool how all the bearings work,” he con- ond time and I see the balloon a second tinued, “and how you have to manipulate time, and I see the drogue parachute. All them to do even simple things like [using] in what appears to be slow motion, all in the push-to-talk switch. We didn’t use it total silence. That was special. It brought on the entire ascent or on the way down, a smile to my face at that moment … and and then only once to confirm I was ready now, when I remember it.” for release. But just the act of getting to that push-to-talk switch, pushing it and releasing it used a lot of energy, and we were saving all energy for freefall and for the canopy ride.” Eustace pre-breathes oxygen prior to his jump. OCTOBER 2019 | PARACHUTIST | USPA.ORG | 83 JUMPING FROM SPACE 101 Eustace and Blignaut make a tandem skydive with a 70-pound bundle strapped to themselves to test maximum exit weights. Photo courtesy of Paragon Development Corporation. DECELERATION Eustace couldn’t deploy a parachute until a minimum of 38,000 feet lest the deceleration hurt himself, the parachute or both. With that waypoint behind him, Eustace deployed his canopy. During a test, Eustace practices landing his canopy wearing full “Since [former record holder] Felix [Baumgartner] spun so badly [on his equipment. Photo by Volker Kern. 127,852-foot world record jump in 2012], I was obsessed with holding head- ing,” Eustace recalled. “[This] required a really delicate touch, since even the smallest of movements above Mach 1 have a big impact on your direction.” He continued, “I was supposed to pull at 10,000 [feet]. I started the pull sequence at 12,000, but since I can’t see the handles, there is an exact se- quence that I have to go through to make sure I pull the main rather than the cutaway handle. I went through it, but as I pulled, my hand slipped off, so I had to go through the sequence again. I laughed at myself, since I had 126,000 feet to get a firm grip on the handle, and because I was obsessed about directional control, I waited until the last minute.” “We had set it up so [Blignaut] was flying in a Kodiak [airplane],” Eustace said. “He jumped out and opened above me, and then he was my wingman on the way down. The moment I opened, within about a minute, my best friend on the project was open and flying right next to me. He was on the radio to tell me about any fences or obstructions, because it is hard to see in that suit.” Blignaut landed about 20 seconds before Eustace in distinctly light- and-variable conditions.
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