- Ryan, Craig.
Magnificent Failure.
Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003.
ISBN 978-1-58834-141-9.
-
In his 1995 book, The Pre-Astronauts
(which I read before I began keeping this list), the author
masterfully explores the pioneering U.S. balloon flights into the
upper atmosphere between the end of World War II and the first
manned space flights, which brought both Air Force and Navy
manned balloon programs to an abrupt halt. These flights are little
remembered today (except for folks lucky enough to have an
attic [or DVD] full
of National Geographics from the epoch, which
covered them in detail). Still less known is the story recounted
here: one man's quest, fuelled only by ambition, determination,
willingness to do whatever it took, persuasiveness, and sheer
guts, to fly higher and free-fall farther than any man had ever
done before. Without the backing of any military service, government
agency, wealthy patron, or corporate sponsor, he achieved his first
goal, setting an altitude record for lighter than air flight which
remains unbroken more than four decades later, and tragically died
from injuries sustained in his attempt to accomplish the second,
after an in-flight accident which remains enigmatic and controversial
to this day.
The term “American original” is over-used in
describing exceptional characters that nation has produced,
but if anybody deserves that designation, Nick Piantanida
does. The son of immigrant parents from the Adriatic island
of
Korčula
(now part of Croatia), Nick was born in 1932 and grew up on
the gritty Depression-era streets of Union City, New Jersey in
the very cauldron of the American melting pot, amid
communities of Germans, Italians, Irish, Jews, Poles,
Syrians, and Greeks. Although universally acknowledged to be
extremely bright, his interests in school were mostly
brawling and basketball. He excelled in the latter, sharing
the 1953 YMCA All-America honours with some guy named
Wilt Chamberlain. After belatedly finishing high school
(bored, he had dropped out to start a scrap iron business,
but was persuaded to return by his parents), he joined the
Army where he was All-Army in basketball for both years of
his hitch and undefeated as a heavyweight boxer.
After mustering out, he received a full basketball scholarship
to Fairleigh Dickinson University, then abruptly quit a few months
into his freshman year, finding the regimentation of college
life as distasteful as that of the Army.
In search of fame, fortune, and adventure, Nick next set his sights
on Venezuela, where he vowed to be the first to climb
Devil's Mountain,
from which
Angel Falls
plummets 807 metres. Penniless, he recruited one of his Army buddies
as a climbing partner and lined up sponsors to fund the expedition.
At the outset, he knew nothing about mountaineering, so he taught
himself on the Hudson River Palisades with the aid of books from
the library. Upon arrival in Venezuela, the climbers learnt to
their dismay that another expedition had just completed the first
ascent of the mountain, so Nick vowed to make the first ascent
of the north face, just beside the falls, which was thought
unclimbable. After an arduous trip through the jungle, during which
their guide quit and left the climbers alone, Nick and his partner
made the ascent by themselves and returned to the acclaim of all.
Such was the determination of this man.
Nick was always looking for adventure, celebrity, and the big
score. He worked for a while as a steelworker on the high
iron of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, but most often supported
himself and, after his marriage, his growing family, by contract
truck driving and, occasionally, unemployment checks. Still,
he never ceased to look for ways, always unconventional, to
make his fortune, nor failed to recruit associates and
find funding for his schemes. Many of his acquaintances
use the word “hustler” to describe him in those
days, and one doubts that Nick would be offended by the honorific.
He opened an exotic animal import business, and ordered cobras,
mongooses, goanna lizards, and other critters mail-order from around
the world for resale to wealthy clients. When buyers failed to
materialise, he staged gladiatorial contests of both animal versus
animal and animal versus himself. Eventually he imported a Bengal
tiger cub which he kept in his apartment until it
had grown so large it could put its paws on his shoulders, whence
he traded the tiger for a decrepit airplane (he had earned a pilot's
license while still in his teens). Offered a spot on the New York
Knicks professional basketball team, he turned it down because
he thought he could make more money barnstorming in his airplane.
Nick finally found his life's vocation when, on a lark, he made
a parachute jump. Soon, he had progressed from static line beginner
jumps to free fall and increasingly advanced skydiving, making as
many jumps as he could afford and find the time for. And then he
had the Big Idea. In 1960,
Joseph Kittinger
had ridden a helium balloon to an altitude of 31,333 metres and
bailed out,
using a small drogue parachute to stabilise his fall until he
opened his main parachute at an altitude of 5,330 metres. Although this
was, at the time (and remains to this day) the highest altitude parachute
jump ever made, skydiving purists do not consider it a true free fall jump
due to the use of the stabilising chute. In 1962, Eugene Andreev
jumped from a Soviet balloon at an altitude of 25,460 metres and did
a pure free fall descent, stabilising himself purely by skydiving
techniques, setting an official free-fall altitude record which also
remains unbroken. Nick vowed to claim both the record for highest
altitude ascent and longest free-fall jump for himself, and set about
it with his usual energy and single-minded determination.
Piantanida faced a daunting set of challenges in achieving his
goal: at the outset he had neither balloon, gondola, spacesuit,
life support system, suitable parachute, nor any knowledge of
or experience with the multitude of specialities whose mastery
is required to survive in the stratosphere, above 99% of the
Earth's atmosphere. Kittinger and Andreev were supported by all
the resources, knowledge, and funding of their respective
superpowers' military establishments, while
Nick had—well…Nick. But he was not to be deterred,
and immediately set out educating himself and lining up people,
sponsors, and gear necessary for the attempt.
The story of what became known as Project Strato-Jump reads like
an early Heinlein novel, with an indomitable spirit pursuing
a goal other, more “reasonable”, people considered
absurd or futile. By will, guile, charm, pull, intimidation,
or simply wearing down adversaries until they gave in just to
make him go away, he managed to line up everything he needed, including
having the company which supplied NASA with its Project Gemini
spacesuits custom tailor one (Nick was built like an NBA
star, not an astronaut) and loan it to him for the project.
Finally, on October 22, 1965, all was ready, and Nick took
to the sky above Minnesota, bound for the edge of space.
But just a few minutes after launch, at just 7,000 metres,
the balloon burst, probably due to a faulty seam in the
polyethylene envelope, triggered by a wind shear at that altitude.
Nick rode down in the gondola under its recovery parachute,
then bailed out at 3200 metres, unglamorously landing in the
Pig's Eye Dump in St. Paul.
Undeterred by the failure, Nick recruited a new balloon manufacturer
and raised money for a second attempt, setting off again for the
stratosphere a second time on February 2, 1966. This time the
ascent went flawlessly, and the balloon rose to an all-time record
altitude of 37,643 metres. But as Nick proceeded through the pre-jump
checklist, when he attempted to disconnect the oxygen hose that fed
his suit from the gondola's supply and switch over to the “bail
out bottle” from which he would breathe during the descent,
the disconnect fitting jammed, and he was unable to dislodge it.
He was, in effect, tethered to the gondola by his oxygen line and
had no option but to descend with it. Ground control cut the gondola's
parachute from the balloon, and after a harrowing descent Nick and
gondola landed in a farm field with only minor injuries. The jump
had failed, but Nick had flown higher than any manned balloon
ever had. But since the attempt was not registered as an
official altitude attempt, although the altitude attained is
undisputed, the record remains unofficial.
After the second failure, Nick's confidence appeared visibly shaken.
Having all that expense, work, and risk undertaken come to nought
due to a small detail with which nobody had been concerned prior
to the flight underlined just how small the margin for error was
in the extreme environment at the edge of space and, by implication,
how the smallest error or oversight could lead to disaster. Still, he
was bent on trying yet again, and on May 1, 1966 (since he was trying
to break a Soviet record, he thought this date particularly
appropriate), launched for the third time. Everything went normally
as the balloon approached 17,375 metres, whereupon the ground crew
monitoring the air to ground voice link heard what was described as
a “whoosh” or hiss, followed by a call of
“Emergen” from Nick, followed by silence.
The ground crew immediately sent a radio command to cut the balloon
loose, and the gondola, with Nick inside, began to descend under its
cargo parachute.
Rescue crews arrived just moments after the gondola touched down
and found it undamaged, but Nick was unconscious and unresponsive.
He was rushed to the local hospital, treated without avail, and then
transferred to a hospital in Minneapolis where he was placed in a
hyperbaric chamber where treatment for decompression sickness
was administered, without improvement. On June 18th, he
was transferred to the National Institute of Health hospital in
Bethesda, Maryland, where he was examined and treated by experts in
decompression disease and hypoxia, but never regained consciousness.
He died on August 25, 1966, with an autopsy finding the cause of death
hypoxia and ruptures of the tissue in the brain due to decompression.
What happened to Nick up there in the sky? Within hours after the
accident, rumours started to circulate that he was the
victim of equipment failure: that his faceplate had blown out
or that the pressure suit had failed in some other manner, leading
to an explosive decompression. This story has been repeated so
often it has become almost canon—consider
this
article from Wired from July 2002. Indeed,
when rescuers arrived on the scene, Nick's “faceplate”
was damaged, but this was just the sun visor which can be pivoted
down to cover the pressure-retaining faceplate, which was intact
and, in a subsequent test of the helmet, found to seal perfectly.
Rescuers assumed the sun visor was damaged by impact with part
of the gondola during the landing and, in any case, would not have
caused a decompression however damaged.
Because the pressure suit had been cut off in the emergency room,
it wasn't possible to perform a full pressure test, but meticulous
inspection of the suit by the manufacturer discovered no flaws which
could explain an explosive decompression. The oxygen supply system
in the gondola was found to be functioning normally, with all pressure
vessels and regulators operating within specifications.
So, what happened? We will never know for sure. Unlike a
NASA mission, there was no telemetry, nor even a sequence camera
recording what was happening in the gondola. And yet, within minutes
after the accident occurred, many members of the ground crew came to
a conclusion as to the probable cause, which those still alive today
have seen no need to revisit. Such was their certainty that
reporter Robert Vaughan gave it as the cause in the story he filed
with Life magazine, which he was dismayed to see replaced
with an ambiguous passage by the editors, because his explanation
did not fit with the narrative chosen for the story. (The
legacy media acted like the legacy media even when they were the
only media and not yet legacy!)
Astonishingly, all the evidence (which, admittedly, isn't very much) seems
to indicate that Nick opened his helmet visor at that extreme
altitude, which allowed the air in suit to rush out
(causing the “whoosh”), forcing the air from his lungs (cutting
off the call of “Emergency!”), and rapidly incapacitating
him. The extended hypoxia and exposure to low pressure as the gondola
descended under the cargo parachute caused irreversible brain damage
well before the gondola landed. But why would Nick do such a crazy thing
as open his helmet visor when in the physiological equivalent of space?
Again, we can never know, but what is known is that he'd
done it before, at lower altitudes, to the dismay of his crew, who warned
him of the potentially dire consequences. There is abundant evidence that
Piantanida violated the oxygen prebreathing protocol before high
altitude exposure not only on this flight, but on a regular basis.
He reported symptoms completely consistent with decompression sickness
(the onset of “the bends”), and is quoted as saying that
he could relieve the symptoms by deflating and reinflating his suit.
Finally, about as close to a smoking gun as we're likely to
find, the rescue crew found Nick's pressure visor unlatched and
rotated away from the seal position. Since Nick would have been
in a coma well before he entered breathable atmosphere, it isn't
possible he could have done this before landing, and there is no way
an impact upon landing could have performed the precise sequence
of operations required to depressurise the suit and open the visor.
It is impossible put oneself inside the mind of such an outlier in the
human population as Nick, no less imagine what he was thinking and feeling
when rising into the darkness above the dawn on the third attempt at
achieving his dream. He was almost certainly suffering from symptoms of
decompression sickness due to inadequate oxygen prebreathing, afflicted
by chronic sleep deprivation in the rush to get the flight off, and
under intense stress to complete the mission before his backers grew
discouraged and the money ran out. All of these factors can cloud the
judgement of even the most disciplined and best trained person, and, it
must be said, Nick was neither. Perhaps the larger puzzle is why members
of his crew who did understand these things, did not speak up,
pull the plug, or walk off the project when they saw what was happening.
But then a personality like Nick can sweep people along through its own
primal power, for better or for worse; in this case, to tragedy.
Was Nick a hero? Decide for yourself—my opinion is no.
In pursuing his own ego-driven ambition, he ended up leaving his
wife a widow and his three daughters without a father they
remember, with only a meagre life insurance policy to support
them. The project was basically a stunt, mounted with the goal
of turning its success into money by sales of story, film, and
celebrity appearances. Even had the jump succeeded, it
would have yielded no useful aeromedical research data
applicable to subsequent work apart from the fact that it was
possible. (In Nick's defence on this account, he approached the
Air Force and NASA, inviting them to supply instrumentation and
experiments for the jump, and was rebuffed.)
This book is an exhaustively researched (involving
many interviews with surviving participants in the events)
and artfully written account of this strange episode
which was, at the same time, the last chapter of the
exploration of the black beyond by intrepid men in their
floating machines and a kind of false dawn precursor of
the private exploration of space which is coming to the fore
almost half a century after Nick Piantanida set out to pursue
his black sky dream. The only embarrassing aspect to this
superb book is that on occasion the author equates state-sponsored
projects with competence, responsibility, and merit. Well, let's
see…. In a rough calculation, using 2007 constant dollars,
NASA has spent northward of half a trillion dollars, killing
a total of 17 astronauts (plus other employees in industrial
accidents on the ground), with all of the astronaut deaths due
to foreseeable risks which management failed to identify or mitigate
in time.
Project Strato-Jump, funded entirely by voluntary contributions,
without resort to the state's monopoly on the use of force, set
an altitude record for lighter than air flight within the atmosphere
which has stood from 1966 to this writing, and accomplished it in
three missions with a total budget of less than (2007 constant) US$400,000,
with the loss of a single life due to pilot error. Yes, NASA has achieved
much, much more. But a million times more?
This is a very long review, so if you've made it to this point and
found it tedious, please accept my excuses. Nick Piantanida has
haunted me for decades. I followed his exploits as they happened,
and were reported on the CBS Evening News in the 1960s. I felt the
frustration of the second flight (with that achingly so far and yet
so near view of the Earth from altitude, when he couldn't jump), and
then the dismay at the calamity on the third, then the long vigil
ending with his sad demise. Astronauts were, well, astronauts,
but Nick was one of us. If a truck driver from New Jersey could,
by main force, travel to the black of space, then why couldn't any of
us? That was the real dream of the Space Age:
Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Well,
Nick managed to lay his hands on a space suit and travel he did!
Anybody who swallowed the bogus mainstream media narrative of
Nick's “suit failure” had to watch the subsequent
Gemini and Apollo EVA missions with a special sense of
apprehension. A pressure suit is one of the few things in the
NASA space program which has no backup: if the pressure garment
fails catastrophically, you're dead before you can do anything
about it. (A slow leak isn't a problem, since there's an oxygen
purge system which can maintain pressure until you can get
inside, but a major seam failure, or having a visor blow out or
glove pop off is endsville.) Knowing that those fellows
cavorting on the Moon were wearing pretty much the same suit as
Nick caused those who believed the propaganda version of his
death to needlessly catch their breath every time one of them
stumbled and left a sitzmark or faceplant in the eternal lunar
regolith.
November 2010 