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The United States also sent a balloon with a crew up in late 1935. Meanwhile, Across the Ocean IR photograph from Explorer II at 21,946 meters Presumably, he thought if the crash were bad, he might be thrown clear. Before the balloon landed, Zille stepped out of the gondola, clinging to a ladder. Instead, he dumped everything he could out to reduce weight. One of the refits was a large parachute designed to stabilize a falling gondola, but Zille was fearful that deploying it would destroy the scientific instruments, wasting the mission. The commander, Christian Zille, ordered his crew to bail out, and they did so at 3,500 and 2,500 meters. In 1935, it reached 16,000 meters but then started plummeting due to gas loss through a faulty valve. Lessons from the tragedy informed a refit of CCCP-1. They had parachutes, but it is thought they were incapacitated by high g-force as the gondola fell, rotating its way down from 12,000 meters. However, the lengthy flight stayed too long in the sun, lost gas, and rapidly descended, killing the three crew members aboard. Not long afterward, in early 1934, a Soviet civilian organization went to 22,000 meters in Osoaviakhim-1. About 3,000 cubic meters of gas took the balloon to a record 19,000 meters. It appears that the method of filling the envelope was the cause of the problem with the first attempt. The first attempt didn’t work well, but the second attempt was a huge success. An air-tight mechanical arrangement allowed the crew to flip the bags over, dumping the lead.

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There were 40 small bags outside the gondola full of lead weights. Control of the height of the balloon was via ballast. Even so, all three of the crew wore pressure suits and parachutes. Life support was some oxygen bottles and chemical CO 2 absorbers. The neck also had a platinum coil around it so that, when heated with an electric current, the bottle would seal again. The bottles had thin necks and an electromagnet would break them open on command. The gondola of CCCP-1 (Image: CC-BY-SA 3.0)For example, the craft had air bottles to sample the atmosphere at different altitudes.

Most of the science experiments were outside, of course, and in 1933, you didn’t have an Arduino and RC servos to control things. The air-tight gondola presented several challenges in design. The envelope was a large amount of thin fabric impregnated with latex and filled with hydrogen. The Soviet Union was keenly interested in Piccard’s flight, and the Soviet Air Force set about to build a research vessel, CCCP-1 (in English, USSR-1), that flew in 1933.

That record wouldn’t stand for long, though. Their gondola was pressurized, and they were the first humans to see the curvature of the Earth and the dark sky above. Auguste Piccard and an assistant took a gas-filled balloon to 15,781 meters in 1931. Either way, there are plenty of design and operational challenges.īalloons, of course, can simply rise to the occasion. Airplanes at high altitudes need a way to get enough oxygen to fuel their engines, or they have to rely on rockets. While the device is deceptively simple, it is possible to get a balloon to very high altitudes without a lot of specialized technology. Regardless, we’ve had balloons a good century earlier than winged flight, if not longer. While the Montgolfier brothers get most of the credit for hot air ballooning in 1783, there are some reports that a Brazilian priest may have lifted himself with a balloon as early as 1709. But people flew much earlier than that by using hot air balloons as well as gas-filled ones. We think of human flight as a relatively modern affair, with a few claims to the first airplane all around the turn of the last century. Piccard inspects an instrument on his balloon (Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-10382 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)