Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 16, 1990 TAG: 9006160096
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Forty thousand feet up, the air will be too thin to breathe. Winds will average 75 miles per hour, not always in the right direction.
And inside the 240-square-foot fiberglass gondola filled with survival gear, radios and the odor of unbathed human bodies, tempers could flare as a British millionaire, an American adventurer and a Soviet cosmonaut ride the jet stream around the world in a balloon called Earthwinds.
None of the discomforts of high-altitude ballooning will dissuade Newman, millionaire Richard Branson and former cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov from trying to claim the last great prize of lighter-than-air flight.
But the success of the venture, which could begin later this year, will depend less on the skill of the crew than on a first-of-its-kind cabin pressurization turbine, state-of-the-art satellite communications and 3,000 pounds of liquid helium ballast that must be kept chilled to 452 degrees below zero.
"Technologically speaking, nothing like this craft has ever existed before," said Newman, the only man alive to have crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in a balloon. "We're going to need everything it has to offer. Otherwise, we don't have a chance."
The attempt to duplicate the fictional voyage of Phineas Fogg will be funded by Branson's Virgin Atlantic Airways and the sports network ESPN.
At least four previous attempts to circumnavigate the Earth failed. Magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes hoped to circle the world in 1974, but he gave up after his balloon was launched by mistake without him aboard. Balloonist Maxie Anderson - who, with Newman, was on board the first successful transatlantic flight - tried three times in the early 1980s to float around the world. Anderson was planning a fourth attempt when he was killed in a European balloon race.
Bob Rice, a meteorologist who will provide weather forecasting support for the Earthwinds crew, says circumnavigation - which requires about 20,000 miles of flight, most at the mercy of the jet stream - poses some formidable challenges.
The goal, in a nutshell, is to make it around the globe before the balloon falls to Earth or the crew runs out of food.
"It helps to think of the wind as a river and the balloon as a piece of wood floating in it," says Rice. "In the middle, everything is fine. But over on the edges, you see curls and eddies where things get trapped and go round and round. That can happen to a balloon."
Earthwinds will be launched sometime next winter when the "middle of the river," the jet stream, is flowing above Akron, Ohio, where the balloon will be inflated with more than 1 million cubic feet of helium gas.
The craft will ascend to at least 40,000 feet, where weather patterns are deemed least likely to disrupt the flow of air from west to east during the two to three weeks the flight will take.
Because of the altitude, Earthwinds' gondola will be pressurized by a gas turbine like those used to keep airliner cabins pressurized. The turbine will also provide heat to keep the crew quarters warm.
Keeping the balloon flying high will depend on an elaborate ballast system. Because of small leaks, balloons slowly lose the gas that keeps them aloft. When temperatures drop at night, the gas contracts, causing the crafts to lose even more altitude.
To combat the problem, all balloons carry ballast that can be jettisoned to make the load lighter. Earthwinds' ballast, however, will be liquid helium, stored in special refrigerated tanks and released into the balloon itself, where it will expand into gaseous helium and provide additional lift.
"It's been a longtime desire of gas balloonists to have a helium system, but there has never been one actually developed," said Tom Barrow, project coordinator for Earthwinds. "It allows you to do in-air refueling. When the liquid is converted, you not only gain the lift, but you lose the weight of the ballast."
Earthwinds will stay in contact with ground support crews via the Inmarsat satellite communications network - another first in modern ballooning.
Satellite communications will make it possible to alert the crew to adverse weather patterns they might be able to avoid by ascending or descending.
by CNB