I leapt from the stratosphere. Here's how I did it | Alan Eustace

311,749 views ・ 2015-09-28

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Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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So I grew up in Orlando, Florida.
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I was the son of an aerospace engineer.
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I lived and breathed the Apollo program.
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We either saw the launches from our backyard
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or we saw it by driving in the hour over to the Cape.
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I was impressed by, obviously, space and everything about it,
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but I was most impressed by the engineering that went into it.
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Behind me you see an amazing view,
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a picture that was taken from the International Space Station,
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and it shows a portion of our planet
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that's rarely seen and rarely studied
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and almost never explored.
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That place is called the stratosphere.
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If you start on the planet and you go up and up and up,
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it gets colder and colder and colder,
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until you reach the beginning of the stratosphere,
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and then an amazing thing happens.
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It gets colder at a much slower rate, and then it starts warming up,
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and then it gets warmer and warmer
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until the point where you can almost survive without any protection,
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about zero degrees,
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and then you end up getting colder and colder,
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and that's the top of the stratosphere.
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It is one of the least accessible places on our planet.
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Most often, when it's visited,
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it's by astronauts who are blazing up at it
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at probably several times the speed of sound,
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and they get a few seconds on the way up,
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and then they get this blazing ball of fire coming back in,
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on the way back in.
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But the question I asked is, is it possible to linger in the stratosphere?
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Is it possible to experience the stratosphere?
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Is it possible to explore the stratosphere?
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I studied this using my favorite search engine
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for quite a while, about a year,
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and then I made a scary phone call.
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It was a reference from a friend of mine to call Taber MacCallum
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from Paragon Space Development Corporation,
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and I asked him the question:
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is it possible to build
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a system to go into the stratosphere?
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And he said it was.
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And after a period of about three years, we proceeded to do just that.
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And on October 24 of last year,
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in this suit,
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I started on the ground,
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I went up in a balloon to 135,890 feet --
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but who's counting?
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(Laughter)
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Came back to Earth at speeds of up to 822 miles an hour.
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It was a four-minute and 27-second descent.
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And when I got to 10,000 feet, I opened a parachute and I landed.
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(Applause)
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But this is really a science talk, and it's really an engineering talk,
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and what was amazing to me about that experience
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is that Taber said, yes, I think we can build a stratospheric suit,
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and more than that, come down tomorrow
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and let's talk to the team that formed the core of the group
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that actually built it.
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And they did something which I think is important,
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which is they took the analogy of scuba diving.
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So in scuba diving,
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you have a self-contained system.
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You have everything that you could ever need.
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You have a scuba tank.
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You have a wetsuit.
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You have visibility.
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And that scuba is exactly this system,
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and we're going to launch it into the stratosphere.
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Three years later, this is what we have.
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We've got an amazing suit that was made by ILC Dover.
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ILC Dover was the company that made all of the Apollo suits
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and all of the extravehicular activity suits.
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They had never sold a suit commercially,
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only to the government,
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but they sold one to me, which I am very grateful for.
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Up here we have a parachute. This was all about safety.
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Everyone on the team knew
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that I have a wife and two small children --
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10 and 15 --
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and I wanted to come back safely.
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So there's a main parachute and a reserve parachute,
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and if I do nothing,
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the reserve parachute is going to open because of an automatic opening device.
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The suit itself can protect me from the cold.
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This area in the front here has thermal protection.
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It will actually heat water that will wrap around my body.
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It has two redundant oxygen tanks.
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Even if I was to get a quarter-inch hole in this suit,
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which is extremely unlikely,
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this system would still protect me from the low pressure of space.
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The main advantage of this system is weight and complexity.
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So the system weighs about 500 pounds,
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and if you compare it to the other attempt recently to go up in the stratosphere,
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they used a capsule.
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And to do a capsule, there's an amazing amount of complexity that goes into it,
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and it weighed about 3,000 pounds,
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and to raise 3,000 pounds to an altitude of 135,000 feet,
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which was my target altitude,
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it would have taken a balloon that was 45 to 50 million cubic feet.
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Because I only weighed 500 pounds in this system,
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we could do it with a balloon that was five times smaller than that,
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and that allowed us to use a launch system that was dramatically simpler
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than what needs to be done for a much larger balloon.
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So with that, I want to take you to Roswell, New Mexico, on October 24.
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We had an amazing team that got up in the middle of the night.
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And here's the suit.
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Again, this is using the front loader that you'll see in a second,
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and I want to play you a video of the actual launch.
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Roswell's a great place to launch balloons,
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but it's a fantastic place to land under a parachute,
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especially when you're going to land 70 miles away from the place you started.
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That's a helium truck in the background.
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It's darkness.
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I've already spent about an hour and a half pre-breathing.
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And then here you see the suit going on.
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It takes about an hour to get the suit on.
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Astronauts get this really nice air-conditioned van
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to go to the launch pad, but I got a front loader.
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(Laughter)
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You can see the top. You can see the balloon up there.
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That's where the helium is.
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This is Dave clearing the airspace with the FAA for 15 miles.
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And there we go.
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(Laughter)
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That's me waving with my left hand.
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The reason I'm waving with my left hand
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is because on the right hand is the emergency cutaway.
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(Laughter)
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My team forbade me from using my right hand.
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So the trip up is beautiful. It's kind of like Google Earth in reverse.
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(Laughter)
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It took two hours and seven minutes to go up,
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and it was the most peaceful two hours and seven minutes.
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I was mostly trying to relax.
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My heart rate was very low
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and I was trying not to use very much oxygen.
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You can see how the fields in the background
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are relatively big at this point,
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and you can see me going up and up.
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It's interesting here, because if you look,
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I'm right over the airport, and I'm probably at 50,000 feet,
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but immediately I'm about to go into a stratospheric wind
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of over 120 miles an hour.
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This is my flight director telling me that I had just gone higher
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than anybody else had ever gone in a balloon,
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and I was about 4,000 feet from release.
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This is what it looks like.
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You can see the darkness of space, the curvature of the Earth,
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the fragile planet below.
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I'm practicing my emergency procedures mentally right now.
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If anything goes wrong, I want to be ready.
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And the main thing that I want to do here
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is to have a release and fall and stay completely stable.
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(Video) Ground control. Everyone ready?
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Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
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Alan Eustace: There's the balloon going by, fully inflated at this point.
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And there you can see a drogue parachute, which I'll demonstrate in just a second,
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because that's really important.
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There's the balloon going by a second time.
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Right now, I'm about at the speed of sound.
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There's nothing for me to tell it's the speed of sound,
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and very soon I will actually be as fast as I ever get,
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822 miles an hour.
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(Video) Ground control: We lost the data.
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AE: So now I'm down low right now
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and you can basically see the parachute come out right there.
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At this point, I'm very happy that there's a parachute out.
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I thought I was the only one happy,
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but it turns out mission control was really happy as well.
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The really nice thing about this is the moment I opened --
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I had a close of friend of mine, Blikkies, my parachute guy.
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He flew in another airplane, and he actually jumped out
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and landed right next to me.
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He was my wingman on the descent.
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This is my landing, but it's probably more properly called a crash.
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(Laughter)
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I hate to admit it, but this wasn't even close to my worst landing.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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(Video) Man: How are you doing?
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AE: Hi there!
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Yay.
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(Laughter)
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So I want to tell you one thing
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that you might not have seen in that video,
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but one of the most critical parts of the entire thing was the release
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and what happens right after you release.
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And what we tried to do was use something called a drogue parachute,
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and a drogue parachute was there to stabilize me.
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And I'll show you one of those right now.
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If any of you have ever gone tandem skydiving,
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you probably used one of these.
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But the problem with one of these things
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is right when you release, you're in zero gravity.
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So it's very easy for this to just turn right around you.
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And before you know it, you can be tangled up or spinning,
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or you can release this drogue late,
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in which case what happens is you're going down at 800 miles an hour,
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and this thing is going to destroy itself
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and not be very useful.
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But the guys at United Parachute Technologies came up with this idea,
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and it was a roll that looks like that,
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but watch what happens when I pull it out.
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It's forming a pipe.
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This pipe is so solid
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that you can take this drogue parachute and wrap it around,
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and there's no way it will ever tangle with you.
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And that prevented a very serious potential problem.
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So nothing is possible without an amazing team of people.
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The core of this was about 20 people
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that worked on this for the three years,
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and they were incredible.
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People asked me what the best part of this whole thing was,
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and it was a chance to work with the best experts
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in meteorology and ballooning and parachute technology
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and environmental systems and high altitude medicine.
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It was fantastic. It's an engineer's dream to work with that group of people.
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And I also at the same time wanted to thank my friends at Google,
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both for supporting me during this effort
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and also covering for me in the times that I was away.
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But there's one other group I wanted to thank, and that's my family.
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Yay.
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(Applause)
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I would constantly give them speeches about the safety of technology,
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and they weren't hearing any of it.
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It was super hard on them,
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and the only reason that my wife put up with it
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was because I came back incredibly happy after each of the 250 tests,
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and she didn't want to take that away from me.
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So I want to close with a story.
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My daughter Katelyn, my 15-year-old, she and I were in the car,
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and we were driving down the road, and she was sitting there,
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and she had this idea, and she goes, "Dad, I've got this idea."
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And so I listened to her idea and I said, "Katelyn, that's impossible."
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And she looks at me
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and she goes, "Dad, after what you just did,
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how can you call anything impossible?"
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And I laughed, and I said, "OK, it's not impossible,
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it's just very, very hard."
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And then I paused for a second, and I said, "Katelyn,
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it may not be impossible, it may not even be very, very hard,
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it's just that I don't know how to do it."
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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