Pressure Glove

After about a year of fascinating research into the design and building of pressure suits, I'm not just making sketches and drawings of my own any more: I'm building it, I'm assembling the items that will take me as near to space as I can get, by means of a high altitude balloon.

Today, a 'proof of concept' for the gloves. An airtight seal is made by binding a heavy rubber glove to the wrist wring; a low-pressure gauge sits where I plan to mount it to monitor suit pressure at altitudes over 30,000 feet. Several elements of this assembly will actually be made of different materials, but for the moment I'm working to prove, in material terms, my concepts.

Looking past low clouds the other night, the sterile vastness of open space seemed to draw at me, the draw you feel when you stand on a cliff edge. Standing there I wanted to leap out of my sneakers, straight up, and an intense frustration with the fact that I cannot simply vault away from the Earth overcame me. We are aware of a whole universe to explore, just up there beyond those puny wisps of condensation--the Universe is right there in front of you, you can reach out and damned near touch it--and yet here we remain, still hacking each other to pieces over religion, oil, or what have you.

Well, for the moment, more building; integration of the pressure helmet and the construction of the pressure restraint garment, and custom cutting and sewing of the flameproof Nomex coverall, to be insulated with aerogel. And then, build the balloon and the capsule. Two, three years; slowly, slowly, and finally up to the Arctic to fly.

But plenty before that; soon to Nevada, to fly the paraglider in preparation for Alaska in December, then Ecuador to dive, dive, dive in search of who-knows-what in the greens and greys of Salango Bay.

Impulse

“I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.”

-- Beryl Markham

My impulse or inspiration is to ascend, to float free, to fly; to be suspended by nothing much, to see from strange heights. To do these I need flying machines; I build them as I learn to fly others. Below, an agricultural tank suitable for converting into a high-altitude ballooning pressure capsule; below that, my pressure suit slowly takes form, cobbled together from a Mig pressure helmet, a diving drysuit, and a dozen other items. Below that, landing my wing on the beach during a test of a customized helmet.

Visualization

Laying back in bed I close my eyes and cut myself adrift from everything and everyone. It's time to go to Alaska, for a few minutes, in my mind. I listen to Holst, "Neptune."



I feel the burn as my legs push me uphill, I feel the wing packed on my back, I see the small patch of iceblue snow where my headlamp illuminates. On the summit, panting, I use an old, practiced motion to unclip my pack and swing it off my shoulders in a single move, then I zip up my hood and slide on heavy mittens as I sit to rest; it'll be cold now that I'm not moving, soon my sweat will begin to freeze and crackle inside my clothes. I'll sit quietly to monitor the wind direction and speed. No need for a wind gauge, I know what 5mph feels like, I know what 8mph and 11mph feel like. I visualize every action; checking my clip-in before launch, reading my checklist, thinking through my flight plan...everything.

Later, when I know everything is right, and the wing is inflated above me, drawing up at me, I'll feel the solitude. I haven't yet found the words to convey the sensation of complete isolation, of riding on the dark side of the moon; there is no one set of words, I realize, the feeling changes, it heaves and slides from terror to calm, it grazes every hue in the spectrum of fear, sometimes it is soft, sometimes razor-sharp. A sharpness will remind me to make my launch flawless. When the wing is stabilized I'll turn and jog a few paces dowslope. That's all that I should need. I might have a single opportunity to abort a launch, a few seconds to spin and drop the wing if it's not right; on the other hand, in some places, I won't. A few paces, I can feel the wing wanting to surge ahead, I use a little brake to slow it, my boots plow heavily in deep snow, then suddenly I'll disengage from the Earth and cast off in to the sky. Everything is done by feel, my body will be tuned into the wing and how its every flex and surge feel when transmitted down through the medium of the lines that connect me to it. I might carry an instrument to indicate my sink rate and altitude, or I might not--it will depend on so many things. However the launch goes, it will be perfect, and the cliff will slip behind me, and a thousand feet below and leaping out ahead will be the unbelievable sight of the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean under a night sky. I might as well be flying above the surface of a distant, unnamed planet.

This is how to do it, laying back and cutting myself off, thinking through every minute action. I've done this for years, visualizing what's to come. Below, generating the numbers that allow me to grasp, crudely, at reality.

Flight Tests

All summer; flight tests to evaluate the performance of my wing in preparation for the Arctic this winter. In the photo from last summer I'm setting up a landing; this is my final pass over the road. Luckily, the last thing I will see, in any respect, in the Arctic, will be any trace of humanity.

The Abyss

At 100 feet below the surface of Puget Sound you begin to see new life forms, like the 'sea whip' in the sketch above (exactly what it is, I'm not yet sure: it's likely related to the 'sea pen', but isn't that, exactly.)

What lies at 200, 300, 400 feet? Do we really believe we know much about the oceans--which cover 75% of the planet--and the beautiful, strange and eerie things that live in them?

In the sketch Todd and I float freely above an undersea canyon, looking down a cliff edge that dropped 500 feet.

On another dive this weekend we went to 132 feet. No narcosis, no problems, clean dive. We keep going.

Todd will move to Vermont later this summer; then I'll begin diving with Angela, and, sometimes, alone. Being alone down there, facing a dozen primordial dreads, will be special...Below, a photo of my "pony tank" -- a redundant supply of breathing gas with a redundant regulator (breathing device)-- slung across my chest. I don't dive below 100 feet without it. It supplies a completely separate backup to may main scuba breathing gas supply (scuba tank, on my back) and my main scuba regulator. Photo by Angela Perri.

Dreamscape

The Arctic cliffs I've identified for this Winter's flying are 900 feet high. Seconds after launch I'll soar out over them and the slope will drop steeply down to fields of cracked sea ice. It should look something like the sketch above, where you see me as a dot suspended below my wing, directing it to turn now and head in for landing...or to spiral-dive for the ice before leveling off for a swoop landing.

It's Arctic Winter, but flying at night won't be dark. There are so many lights in the sky, and they reflect up off the landfast snows and ice.

There are the tilting and fading aurora; there is the incomprehensible glow of the Milky Way; there are small, bright whips and larger lashings of glittering snow being blown up from surface of the frozen sea, drawn up and up the cliff face by wind. There are the cold, friendly stars, of course, and the colored, hurrying planets; and there's the reflection of the white disc of the Moon, which makes fields of snow come up bright, shining. The only darkness, really, is between the lights.

Arctic Circles

The other night, after hours spent poring over maps of the Arctic coasts of Alaska, I found it: the perfect place for paragliding aviation of the kind I want to do there: low and slow flights, alone and in the darkness of Arctic Winter. As I surveyed my charts, inscribing circles around peaks showing how far I could fly depending on launch elevation, wind speed and wind direction, a perfect conjunction appeared. I dropped my compass. This was it! I leaned over the map. Were my numbers right, my circles the right size? Yes. This was it! This was the place! Laughing out loud, I looked closer at my discovery.

The site has four peaks in a rough square about two miles on a side; a flight down from any of these peaks--depending on winds, my wing's glide ratio, my speed and a dozen other factors--should land me at a base camp in short order; my flights look to be about 2-5 minutes in duration. I can fly from halfway up a slope and skim tundra all the way down. I can hike up the backside of a peak and launch off it's West side, where just seconds from launch the cliff will drop nearly a thousand feet to the frozen sea below. I will place caches of emergency rations, stove fuel, and spare charts in various strategic locations so I am never more than a mile from supplies that can keep me alive.

The base camp site is above and a primitive attempt at sketching out a flight planning sheet is shown below, as is a table estimating flight time in minutes for launches at various altitudes with flights at certain glide slopes and speeds.

But I have to keep in mind that wind, my weight, and my efficiency at flying the wing all warp my tables and theoretical projections. The tables and numbers are only the crudest guides. I think of them as gesturing, vaguely, at reality. I need to know them, but I musn't think they're reality.