Huge ballon!

[YT2095]

September 01 2003 at 01:12PM

 

St Ives, England - Two British pilots were making final preparations on Monday to take the world's biggest manned helium balloon to the edge of space.

 

Colin Prescot, 53, and Andy Elson, 48, hope to set a world record by piloting their 387m-tall craft, QinetiQ 1, to 39 600m.

 

They plan to drift there for an hour and conduct experiments on the stratosphere before returning to earth and, they hope, a place in history books.

 

"I'm feeling calm but very pleased," Prescott said of a good weather forecast for Tuesday's launch as the balloon was being put on a ship for lift-off near St Ives in Cornwall, south-west England.

 

Pilots will wear space suits and sit in an open canopy at -70°C

"I will be rehearsing everything in my mind during the next day," he said.

 

The QinetiQ 1's canopy is made of 1,7 ton of polyethylene only as thick as a household freezer bag but will be 400 times the size of a regular balloon when fully inflated - that's as tall as New York's Empire State Building.

 

Scientists from the Russian space agency Zvezda will help the pilots into pressurised spacesuits that will enable them to survive temperatures as low as -70°C while riding in the balloon's open gondola.

 

The balloon is scheduled to lift off between 6am and 8am from the research ship Trinton 15km offshore.

 

It should take four to five hours to reach its target altitude and two hours to return to earth. A British military helicopter will pick up the pilots after splashdown in the sea.

 

The envelope will be 40 times the size of a regular balloon

At their target altitude Prescot and Elson will be floating in a virtually atmosphere-free environment and be able to see the curvature of the earth.

 

The two men, both commercial balloon pilots, have 40 years' experience between them and a number of ballooning records.

 

Most recently they jointly set the world endurance record for any aircraft in the earth's atmosphere by flying from Spain to the Pacific in 17 days, 18 hours and 25 minutes as part of a round-the-world attempt.

 

They initially tried to make the "space" flight last year but poor weather forced them to cancel.

 

The altitude record for a manned balloon - 34 667m - was set in 1961 by United States navy pilots Malcolm Ross and Vic Prather in Strato-Lab, part of the US space programme.

 

Nobody since then has tried to go higher, leaving the upper reaches of the stratosphere - nicknamed the "ignorosphere" - largely unexplored.

 

The balloon is sponsored by QinetiQ, a British science and technology research firm, and is expected to be visible for many kilometres during its flight.

 

Police urged spectators to avoid Saint Ives but to watch instead from a number of vantage points along the north Cornish coast. - Sapa-AFP

 

(taken from google news at 13:41 GMT)