![]() White’s role on the project was to help develop scientific instruments that could be attached to the outside of the balloon gondola to measure radiation exposure - and the larger team’s efforts were successful. The Strato-Lab team was laying the groundwork for humanity’s move to orbit. Soon afterward, he found himself working as a naval researcher on Project Strato-lab, which was being used to pioneer new experiments in the upper atmosphere and test the technology needed to keep humans alive at those altitudes. He had served in the Air Force during World War II before going on to study astronomy at The Ohio State University. White was a veteran of one of these earlier efforts. These early balloon flights managed to image the Sun in unprecedented detail, as well as make high-resolution observations of the larger cosmos that were hard to get from ground-based telescopes. #Future gazer how to#Plus, a balloon drifts, spins and tilts, meaning that engineers had to figure out how to stabilize and point the telescope while it was moving unpredictably.Ī few other efforts had already managed to successfully mount telescopes to balloons. ![]() The telescope was exposed to the open air of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Begun just a year before the creation of NASA, the project’s engineers and scientists had to develop a way to mount a working telescope to the roof of a balloon’s gondola. Navy, Air Force, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Project Stargazer was a joint effort between the U.S. Results published earlier this year show that modern balloon-borne observatories are now approaching resolutions once only possible with orbiting observatories. That means balloons could soon give the same space telescopes that replaced them a run for their money. Yet, in just the past decade, high-altitude balloons have seen something of a renaissance - and this time, instead of humans at the helm, the flights are fully robotic. And by the early 1970s, balloon-based experiments had given astronomers enough confidence to start launching artificial satellites with telescopes and other instruments into low-Earth orbit. ![]() You see, NASA and its fledgling Mercury Program had put John Glenn in orbit just six months before Stargazer's flight. And ultimately, that single flight marked the end of a brief era of high-altitude, crewed balloon flights. For the two men on board, William White and Joseph Kittinger, this was supposed to be just the beginning of a bright future for balloon-borne astronomy.īut despite their best efforts, Project Stargazer lost funding, leading to the cancellation of all but one of the mission’s four planned crewed flights. Only a handful of crewed balloon flights had ever reached greater heights. ![]() Over the course of the next 18.5 hours, the mission, called Project Stargazer, climbed to a staggering 82,000 feet (25 kilometers) in altitude and drifted above the desert. ![]() Their trip was the culmination of a years-long project, first started in 1957, that aimed to show that high-altitude balloons could be used to observe the cosmos, far from most of the interference of Earth’s twinkle-inducing atmosphere. Inside was a small research telescope and a suite of custom instruments designed to study the cosmos. On the morning of December 13, 1962, a Navy astronomer and an Air Force captain stepped out of the New Mexico Sun and into a small steel capsule attached to a nearly 300-foot-tall mylar balloon. ![]()
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