High Dive

For Clark, building a space-diving suit is a personal mission, a way of exacting "payback from death," he says. "My wife died in the pursuit of this, and a day doesn't go by when I don't think about how I can learn from this and help the next person do it safer."

Clark and Tumlinson find complement, not conflict, in their differences. Likewise, the two prongs of the space-diver effort are intertwined: Adventure-sport space dives will provide a real-world testbed to develop the technology for safety. Through repeated dives, Clark will amass data on how various suits and chutes and humans perform through the whole descent profile. "It's what the Air Force did in the '50s and '60s with test pilots and parachute jumps," Clark notes. Validate the equipment and then systematically refine it until it´s reliable enough for emergency use.

Adrenaline-junkie space divers, therefore, constitute the project´s test pilots. Even better–they will be paying Tumlinson and Clark for the privilege. Money wasn´t much of a problem for the old Air Force when testing survival gear, but in the nascent civilian space field, it´s in many ways the greatest hurdle. However much commercial operators might want their passengers outfitted with space-diver life jackets, no one has the money to pay for testing. But it may take only one disaster for the FAA to require them.

Suit Up

There´s very little precedent for what Clark and Tumlinson are trying to pull off. The highest skydive on record is 102,800 feet, set by U.S. Air Force captain Joseph Kittinger, who jumped from a balloon in August 1960. His record has held for nearly 50 years–several other jumpers have attemped to break it but failed because of funding and hardware issues–yet Kittinger, now 78, doesn't brag. "We were trying to gather information for the space program, not beat a record," he says. "It doesn't take a highly trained skydiver to survive. You just have to have the proper system."

The 120,000-foot dive that Tumlinson and Clark propose for demonstrating their equipment is essentially the same feat as Kittinger's, and whoever undergoes their initial tests will need no more equipment than he had: an oxygen supply to breathe, a drogue chute to prevent runaway spins, a main chute to land at survivable speeds, and a pressure suit. Exposing the human body to a near vacuum is an ugly business, something Clark can describe in gruesome detail. The same air emboli and nitrogen bubbles–"the bends"–that kill scuba divers can also kill people at high altitude. And if you go anywhere above 63,000 feet without a pressure suit, a worse fate will be yours: The water in your blood turns to gas in the low pressure. People refer to this as blood "boiling."

To develop the systems necessary for safe jumps from this and even higher altitudes, he and Tumlinson are pulling together a team of respected specialists. They will help Orbital Outfitters design space suits for their own dives and for other companies' future space-tourist operations. Tumlinson has hired noted aquatic-dive and life-support specialist Bill Stone [see "Robot Subs in Space," February] to create the internal thermal-regulation and breathing systems for the suits, as well as their data-acquisition systems. Chris Gilman, the founder of special-effects company Global Effects, will design the pressure suits. Gilman is an Academy Award-winning designer who has created replica space suits for movies, including Armageddon, as well as prototype suits for NASA. The actual engineering of the suits–that little save-your-life part–will be managed by Tomas Svitek, a NASA consultant and freelance program manager who Tumlinson has brought on to make Gilman´s designs technologically sound [see the graphic above for an annotated look].