Steve Truglia: A leap from the edge of space

25,287 views ・ 2009-09-09

TED


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

00:18
I'm extremely excited to be given the opportunity
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to come and speak to you today
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about what I consider to be
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the biggest stunt on Earth.
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Or perhaps not quite on Earth.
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A parachute jump from the very edge of space.
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More about that a bit later on.
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What I'd like to do first is take you through
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a very brief helicopter ride of stunts
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and the stunts industry in the movies and in television,
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and show you how technology
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has started to interface with the physical skills
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of the stunt performer
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in a way that makes the stunts bigger
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and actually makes them safer than they've ever been before.
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I've been a professional stunt man for 13 years.
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I'm a stunt coordinator. And as well as perform stunts
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I often design them.
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During that time, health and safety has become everything about my job.
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It's critical now that when a car crash happens
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it isn't just the stunt person we make safe, it's the crew.
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We can't be killing camera men. We can't be killing stunt men.
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We can't be killing anybody or hurting anybody on set,
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or any passerby. So, safety is everything.
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But it wasn't always that way.
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In the old days of the silent movies --
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Harold Lloyd here, hanging famously from the clock hands --
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a lot of these guys did their own stunts. They were quite remarkable.
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They had no safety, no real technology.
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What safety they had was very scant.
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This is the first stunt woman,
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Rosie Venger, an amazing woman.
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You can see from the slide, very very strong.
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She really paved the way
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at a time when nobody was doing stunts, let alone women.
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My favorite and a real hero of mine is Yakima Canutt.
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Yakima Canutt really formed the stunt fight.
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He worked with John Wayne and most of those old punch-ups you see
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in the Westerns. Yakima was either there or he stunt coordinated.
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This is a screen capture from "Stagecoach,"
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where Yakima Canutt is doing one of the most dangerous stunts I've ever seen.
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There is no safety, no back support,
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no pads, no crash mats, no sand pits in the ground.
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That's one of the most dangerous horse stunts, certainly.
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Talking of dangerous stunts and bringing things slightly up to date,
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some of the most dangerous stunts we do as stunt people are fire stunts.
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We couldn't do them without technology.
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These are particularly dangerous
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because there is no mask on my face.
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They were done for a photo shoot. One for the Sun newspaper,
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one for FHM magazine.
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Highly dangerous, but also you'll notice
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it doesn't look as though I'm wearing anything underneath the suit.
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The fire suits of old, the bulky suits, the thick woolen suits,
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have been replaced with modern materials
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like Nomex or, more recently, Carbonex --
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fantastic materials that enable us as stunt professionals
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to burn for longer, look more spectacular, and in pure safety.
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Here's a bit more.
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There's a guy with a flame thrower there, giving me what for.
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One of the things that a stuntman often does,
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and you'll see it every time in the big movies,
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is be blown through the air.
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Well, we used to use trampettes. In the old days, that's all they had.
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And that's a ramp. Spring off the thing and fly through the air,
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and hopefully you make it look good.
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Now we've got technology. This thing is called an air ram.
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It's a frightening piece of equipment for the novice stunt performer,
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because it will break your legs very, very quickly
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if you land on it wrong.
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Having said that, it works with compressed nitrogen.
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And that's in the up position. When you step on it,
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either by remote control or with the pressure of your foot,
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it will fire you, depending on the gas pressure,
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anything from five feet to 30 feet.
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I could, quite literally, fire myself into the gallery.
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Which I'm sure you wouldn't want.
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Not today.
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Car stunts are another area
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where technology and engineering
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advances have made life easier for us, and safer.
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We can do bigger car stunts than ever before now.
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Being run over is never easy.
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That's an old-fashioned, hard, gritty, physical stunt.
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But we have padding, and fantastic shock-absorbing things like Sorbothane --
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the materials that help us, when we're hit like this,
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not to hurt ourselves too much.
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The picture in the bottom right-hand corner there
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is of some crash test dummy work that I was doing.
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Showing how stunts work in different areas, really.
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And testing breakaway signpost pillars.
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A company makes a Lattix pillar, which is a network,
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a lattice-type pillar that collapses when it's hit.
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The car on the left drove into the steel pillar.
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And you can't see it from there, but the engine was in the driver's lap.
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They did it by remote control.
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I drove the other one at 60 miles an hour, exactly the same speed,
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and clearly walked away from it.
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Rolling a car over is another area where we use technology.
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We used to have to drive up a ramp, and we still do sometimes.
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But now we have a compressed nitrogen cannon.
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You can just see, underneath the car, there is a black rod on the floor
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by the wheel of the other car.
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That's the piston that was fired out of the floor.
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We can flip lorries, coaches, buses, anything over
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with a nitrogen cannon with enough power. (Laughs)
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It's a great job, really. (Laughter)
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It's such fun!
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You should hear
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some of the phone conversations that I have with people
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on my Bluetooth in the shop.
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"Well, we can flip the bus over, we can have it burst into flames,
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and how about someone, you know, big explosion."
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And people are looking like this ...
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(Laughs)
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I sort of forget how bizarre some of those conversations are.
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The next thing that I'd like to show you is something that
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Dunlop asked me to do earlier this year
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with our Channel Five's "Fifth Gear Show."
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A loop-the-loop, biggest in the world.
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Only one person had ever done it before.
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Now, the stuntman solution to this in the old days would be,
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"Let's hit this as fast as possible. 60 miles an hour.
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Let's just go for it. Foot flat to the floor."
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Well, you'd die if you did that.
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We went to Cambridge University, the other university,
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and spoke to a Doctor of Mechanical Engineering there,
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a physicist who taught us that it had to be 37 miles an hour.
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Even then, I caught seven G
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and lost a bit of consciousness on the way in.
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That's a long way to fall, if you get it wrong. That was just about right.
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So again, science helps us, and with the engineering too --
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the modifications to the car and the wheel.
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High falls, they're old fashioned stunts.
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What's interesting about high falls
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is that although we use airbags,
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and some airbags are quite advanced,
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they're designed so you don't slip off the side like you used to,
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if you land a bit wrong. So, they're a much safer proposition.
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Just basically though, it is a basic piece of equipment.
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It's a bouncy castle
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with slats in the side to allow the air to escape.
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That's all it is, a bouncy castle.
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That's the only reason we do it. See, it's all fun, this job.
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What's interesting is we still use cardboard boxes.
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They used to use cardboard boxes years ago and we still use them.
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And that's interesting because they are almost retrospective.
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They're great for catching you, up to certain heights.
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And on the other side of the fence,
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that physical art, the physical performance of the stuntman,
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has interfaced with the very highest
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technology in I.T. and in software.
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Not the cardboard box, but the green screen.
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This is a shot of "Terminator," the movie.
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Two stunt guys doing what I consider to be a rather benign stunt.
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It's 30 feet. It's water. It's very simple.
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With the green screen we can put any background in the world on it,
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moving or still,
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and I can assure you, nowadays you can't see the joint.
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This is a parachutist with another parachutist doing exactly the same thing.
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Completely in the safety of a studio,
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and yet with the green screen we can have some moving image that a skydiver took,
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and put in the sky moving and the clouds whizzing by.
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Decelerator rigs and wires, we use them a lot.
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We fly people on wires, like this.
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This guy is not skydiving. He's being flown like a kite,
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or moved around like a kite.
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And this is a Guinness World Record attempt.
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They asked me to open their 50th anniversary show in 2004.
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And again, technology meant that I could do the fastest abseil over 100 meters,
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and stop within a couple of feet of the ground
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without melting the rope with the friction,
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because of the alloys I used in the descender device.
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And that's Centre Point in London.
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We brought Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road to a standstill.
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Helicopter stunts are always fun,
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hanging out of them, whatever.
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And aerial stunts. No aerial stunt would be the same without skydiving.
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Which brings us quite nicely to why I'm really here today:
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Project Space Jump.
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In 1960, Joseph Kittenger of the United States Air Force
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did the most spectacular thing.
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He did a jump from 100,000 feet, 102,000 to be precise,
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and he did it to test high altitude systems
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for military pilots
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in the new range of aircraft that were going up to 80,000 feet or so.
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And I'd just like to show you a little footage
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of what he did back then.
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And just how brave he was in 1960, bear in mind.
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Project Excelsior, it was called.
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There were three jumps.
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They first dropped some dummies.
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So that's the balloon, big gas balloon.
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It's that shape because the helium has to expand.
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My balloon will expand to 500 times
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and look like a big pumpkin when it's at the top.
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These are the dummies being dropped from 100,000 feet,
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and there is the camera that's strapped to them.
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You can clearly see the curvature of the Earth at that kind of altitude.
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And I'm planning to go from 120,000 feet,
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which is about 22 miles.
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You're in a near vacuum in that environment,
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which is in minus 50 degrees.
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So it's an extremely hostile place to be.
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This is Joe Kittenger himself.
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Bear in mind, ladies and gents, this was 1960.
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He didn't know if he would live or die. This is an extremely brave man.
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I spoke with him on the phone a few months ago.
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He's a very humble and wonderful human being.
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He sent me an email, saying, "If you get this thing off the ground
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I wish you all the best." And he signed it, "Happy landings,"
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which I thought was quite lovely.
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He's in his 80s and he lives in Florida. He's a tremendous guy.
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This is him in a pressure suit.
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Now one of the challenges of going up to altitude is
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when you get to 30,000 feet -- it's great, isn't it? --
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When you get to 30,000 feet you can really only use oxygen.
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Above 30,000 feet up to nearly 50,000 feet,
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you need pressure breathing, which is where you're wearing a G suit.
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This is him in his old rock-and-roll jeans there,
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pushing him in, those turned up jeans.
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You need a pressure suit.
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You need a pressure breathing system
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with a G suit that squeezes you, that helps you to breathe in
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and helps you to exhale.
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Above 50,000 feet you need a space suit, a pressure suit.
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Certainly at 100,000 feet no aircraft will fly.
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Not even a jet engine.
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It needs to be rocket-powered or one of these things,
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a great big gas balloon.
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It took me a while; it took me years to find the right balloon team
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to build the balloon that would do this job.
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I've found that team in America now.
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And it's made of polyethylene, so it's very thin.
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We will have two balloons for each of my test jumps,
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and two balloons for the main jump, because they
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notoriously tear on takeoff.
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They're just so, so delicate.
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This is the step off. He's written on that thing,
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"The highest step in the world."
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And what must that feel like?
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I'm excited and I'm scared,
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both at the same time in equal measures.
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And this is the camera that he had on him as he tumbled
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before his drogue chute opened to stabilize him.
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A drogue chute is just a smaller chute which helps to keep your face down.
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You can just see them there, popping open.
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Those are the drogue chutes. He had three of them.
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I did quite a lot of research.
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And you'll see in a second there, he comes back down to the floor.
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Now just to give you some perspective of this balloon,
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the little black dots are people.
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It's hundreds of feet high. It's enormous.
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That's in New Mexico.
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That's the U.S. Air Force Museum.
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And they've made a dummy of him. That's exactly what it looked like.
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My gondola will be more simple than that.
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It's a three sided box, basically.
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So I've had to do quite a lot of training.
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This is Morocco last year in the Atlas mountains,
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training in preparation for some high altitude jumps.
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This is what the view is going to be like
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at 90,000 feet for me.
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Now you may think this is just
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a thrill-seeking trip, a pleasure ride,
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just the world's biggest stunt.
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Well there's a little bit more to it than that.
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Trying to find a space suit to do this
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has led me to an area of technology
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that I never really expected when I set about doing this.
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I contacted a company in the States
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who make suits for NASA.
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That's a current suit. This was me last year with their chief engineer.
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That suit would cost me about a million and a half dollars.
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And it weighs 300 pounds and you can't skydive in it.
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So I've been stuck. For the past 15 years I've been trying to find a space suit
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that would do this job, or someone that will make one.
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Something revolutionary happened
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a little while ago, at the same facility.
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That's the prototype of the parachute. I've now had them custom make one,
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the only one of its kind in the world. And that's the only suit of its kind in the world.
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It was made by a Russian that's designed
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most of the suits of the past
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18 years for the Soviets.
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He left the company because he saw,
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as some other people in the space suit industry,
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an emerging market for space suits for space tourists.
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You know if you are in an aircraft at 30,000 feet
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and the cabin depressurizes, you can have oxygen.
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If you're at 100,000 feet you die.
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In six seconds you've lost consciousness. In 10 seconds you're dead.
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Your blood tries to boil. It's called vaporization.
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The body swells up. It's awful.
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And so we expect -- it's not much fun.
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We expect, and others expect,
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that perhaps the FAA, the CAA
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might say, "You need to put someone in a suit
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that's not inflated, that's connected to the aircraft."
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Then they're comfortable, they have good vision, like this great big visor.
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And then if the cabin depressurizes
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while the aircraft is coming back down,
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in whatever emergency measures, everyone is okay.
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I would like to bring Costa on, if he's here,
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to show you the only one of its kind in the world.
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13:26
I was going to wear it,
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but I thought I'd get Costa to do it, my lovely assistant.
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Thank you. He's very hot. Thank you, Costa.
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13:35
This is the communication headset you'll see
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on lots of space suits.
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It's a two-layer suit. NASA suits have got 13 layers.
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This is a very lightweight suit. It weighs about 15 pounds.
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It's next to nothing. Especially designed for me.
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It's a working prototype. I will use it for all the jumps.
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Would you just give us a little twirl, please, Costa?
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Thank you very much.
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And it doesn't look far different when it's inflated,
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as you can see from the picture down there.
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I've even skydived in it in a wind tunnel,
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which means that I can practice everything I need to practice, in safety,
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before I ever jump out of anything. Thanks very much, Costa.
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(Applause)
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Ladies and gentlemen, that's just about it from me.
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The status of my mission at the moment
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is it still needs a major sponsor.
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I'm confident that we'll find one.
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I think it's a great challenge.
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And I hope that you will agree with me,
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it is the greatest stunt on Earth.
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Thank you very much for your time.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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