- Everybody ready?
One, two, three..
All right, somewhere about here.
- We're gonna lay the balloon and the basket that way,
so you can do the suit up right here.
Many years have lead up to the flying that we're doing now.
I don't think I've ever looked forward to
anything more than this.
- Trent, I guess you're taking care of fuel tanks?
Now I get to put all of this time and
all of this energy into the ultimate adventure,
which is flight.
You gotta let it keep those sides out.
[String Music]
Fantastic job.
I get to have the history of space and flying exploration,
and I get to do it in a spacesuit that I have built.
OK, you can hand me the pressure valves.
This is hard for me to beat as a life experience.
Thank you, reading glad co. We're gonna put my helmet on
and pressurize, and go.
My name is Cameron Smith. I am
an Archaeology professor at Portland State University.
And for the past eight years I've been building my own
spacesuit.
When I was 12, my dad would bring home eight millimeter
footage from the moon landings, and he'd project
them on the bedroom wall. And I would watch these alien
scenes; that was a pretty magical thing to me.
A lot of it was about something new; a lot of it was about
exploration-seeing something that hadn't been seen before.
Between the ages of 10 and 14, I wrote to all of the
Apollo Astronauts. And I was trying to get into space; I
wanted to know how. They told me to fly for the military,
but my eyes weren't perfect. So, that was the end of that
dream, when I was very young.
For a long time, I thought if I were just a little
smarter, if I could be more resourceful,
then I really did think I could go to space.
So, I thought the way that I could get there was to
build a balloon and to make my own space suit.
For the human body space is a very difficult place.
In the shade it can be minus 300 Fahrenheit.
In the sunshine it can be plus 300 Fahrenheit.
That's hard to imagine.
For all these reasons, if you're going into space,
you'd be well advised to wear a spacesuit.
A spacesuit is basically a compression device.
It holds you together in the absence of atmospheric
pressure.
It has some properties that are going to keep you warm,
but is also doesn't keep you too warm. It has to be
gas impermeable; it should be flame proof, so it can't
catch fire. You're dealing with fuels of all kinds, and
it also has to be non-stretch. That is, you don't want it
to be ballooning up when the suit is pressurized.
It's a fascinating challenge to get all of those things
functioning in one environment.
All right, first pressurization attempt with the newly
reinstalled appendix.
All right, so this is a test, keeping the
fire extinguisher armed.
Two hundred holes built for a new visor.
At 2 PSI, to be able to do that
is astounding.
It sounds mind-boggling: how do you build a spacesuit?
Well, I started looking at the history of the early
pressure suits in the 1930s.
People were trying to fly
to high altitudes in balloons, and when I read their stories
and I learned exactly how they built those suits,
and I learned that they flew to 50 and 60,000
feet and most of them survived, I thought surely if they
could do that with pigskin and leather and rubber,
I can use today's materials and do the same thing.
- OK, here we go.
- [Cameron] OK.
The basic spacesuit to get you to orbit and back
has been on the order of a $100,000,
and weighing almost 75 pounds.
My goal has been $1,000, 5 kilos
or about 11 pounds; and to reach 63,000 feet
above the surface of the earth.
At that altitude the only thing that will keep me
alive in my balloon flights is my spacesuit.
When I started all of this, I used the cheapest
and most available things possible to prove the design.
So, for example, for the neck ring for the helmet,
I was using a pie tin. I've used common plumbing ball
valves, motorcycle batteries, aquarium pumps.
Zip ties are tremendous.
Basically I'm trying to mount this valve on this side
so it's not going to flop around.
The least interesting way to have done this would
be to buy a Russian space suit on Ebay, you can do that.
But that's not fun; that's not interesting to
just copy what somebody else has done.
I wanted to reinvent the wheel myself.
So we will be able to reach suit pressure, which
will not come up high.
The margins for error on this project are very slim,
and you need to be willing to work at this through
failure after failure.
I have failed, and then rebuilt the thing, and that
failed. And I rebuilt it and that failed; sometimes
I was trying to fix a technical problem for a couple
of years. But then I would say, "I'm not gonna get
"beaten by this and try again."
OK, I'm going to start going through a few of the
set of checklists just to be sure we have all the
items. So we're looking at
crew gloves, and those are in
the orange case. Five, six, seven eight.
We have our pin keepers.
Now these are flying instruments, so
a little bit delicate; if we could put these up high,
so that they're not being crushed.
I have to run this like a small space program.
And I have to have every checklist item theoretically
known, practically understood, practiced, simulated
many times, and then I have to fulfill that sequence
perfectly during the flight. And I know that somewhere
deep in the labyrinth of the system some little mistake
could kill me. That's a great challenge; if I wanted
to do something easy I would pick something easy.
But that doesn't interest me.
The difficulty intrigues me and is a source of
vitality for my life. This is all the paperwork
required to fly a balloon. Somebody asked me one
time if this was a suicide mission. I thought that
was rather stupid. If this is a suicide mission it
is the most expensive and longest suicide in history.
It's eight years and all of my time and energy and passion.
So this is a very bad way to kill yourself.
I think we have now succeeded in building the
thousand dollar spacesuit. Nobody will believe
me of course until I test it and prove it in
space conditions. And it can work, it can work.
Because there's no wind I'd like to kinda go dead center
of the playa, and then we'll set everything up.
And no matter which way the wind is going we've
got.. Yeah. OK, any questions?
OK, great.
Thanks, guys.
We've gotta pull the sides up. Watch your head.
Standby.
OK, we can prepare the suit.
Sun is coming up now.
OK, it all looks nice and squared away we should launch.
We got a fuel quantity check done?
Just like when I was a kid, and dad projected these
Apollo landing films, now I'm flying a balloon; and
when I'm wearing this suit and doing that, well
that's pretty special for me.
These are childhood dreams coming true.
Com check. Everything's good, suit's one PSI.
I know that there'll be a moment on the highest
flight where I'll realize I've done what I wanted
to do and everything works. And it might only
be 10 seconds in your life.
Altitude one thousand feet.
I really believe that when I get to the very high
altitude and my suit is functioning and the
temperature is right and my altimeter reads
63,000 feet. I know that that 10 seconds
is going to be great, and it's going to be a treasure
that I can bring home, and I can live off that for years
no matter what calamity comes along. It doesn't matter,
I will be able to live on that 10 seconds of
experience maybe for the rest of my life.
That will make everything worth it.