The plan: Fly into space
The man: Cameron M. Smith
Cameron M. Smith is planning to explore one of the earth’s last unknown, unexplored regions—50,000 feet up in the lower stratosphere—and he’s planning to go up in a balloon. To that end, he’s making a pressurized space suit almost entirely from materials you could pick up at Home Depot, plus an authentic fighter helmet that was flying around the Soviet Union in 1984, which he bought it off eBay for $350.
What he’s up against: the fatal consequences of landing on a power line and catching on fire, the fatal consequences of a plastic coupler breaking at -40ºF, the fatal consequences of any unforeseen leaks in the suit way, way up there. “Suddenly I would hear a hiss,” he says. “My ears would pop, the pressure would drop, and then I would black out. I would have a few seconds of consciousness, so I am doing everything I can to make sure that this suit is air-tight.”
The blinds are drawn at his workshop in Portland, Oregon. A bed of marigolds grows in a cement planter outside. Cameron, a burly guy with a beard and hearty laugh, puts on safety glasses (you never know). He flips a switch. The suit hisses and begins inflating with oxygen. If it weren’t a web of custom mesh netting, nylon straps and wire over his diving dry-suit, the rubber suit would puff up like the Michelin man. (The combination of sewing needles and the need for leak-proof suit proves worrisome, though, so he’s cataloging every single needle used in construction). As the gauge on the suit’s left arm rises to 3 PSI, none of the metal cap-stands fly off. Under the helmet, a Styrofoam head stares across the room looking where Smith does every night: A closet with three suits hang—a Chinese partial pressure suit, a Russian flame-proof insulation suit, and an Arctic wind suit. On another wall in his book-lined apartment hangs a framed response from astronaut Ken Mattingly. It says: Come fly with us.
If all goes as planned, Smith will fly in 2013. He’s testing his suit in the FAA’s hypobaric (atmospheric) chambers and building a 77,000-cubic foot hot-air balloon. His mission is two-fold: One, provide an inexpensive model for the future of privatized space travel; two, fulfill a lifelong dream that indeed, as Mattingly wrote, a model of inclusionary space flight—one vindicating his exclusion because of NASA’s rigorous vision requirements and because he’s not quite as rich as Richard Branson.
“If they could do this in the 1930s with rubberized canvas and pigskin gloves surely I can do that now with technology available,” Smith says. “This is not so crazy. This is not so wild.”