- 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.
