Around the World In 14 Days

An anonymous reader writes: "Adventurer Steve Fossett succeeded Tuesday on his sixth try to pilot a balloon solo around the world, crossing the meridian where he started his historic journey June 19, his ground crew at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, announced. Here is the official site, while there's also several other articles, including this one."

Comments

Re:Haha!

[fruey]

No, Branson gave up long ago. I met him when he took off from Marrakech, Morocco, in 1999. He was with Steve Fosset at that time and I was lucky to talk to Steve, who's a pretty genuine guy.

Branson never attempted the flight solo. He was pipped on the circumnavigation by some other team, and Fosset then went alone to become the first to do it solo.

Official rules as to what constitutes a flight which is a real circumnavigation are on the site, it has to be between the two 30 degree meridiens basically... in any case it will not be ratified until some weeks have passed.

One of the more quaint rules is...

[Thagg]

That you have to survive the landing for 48 hours, something that Fosset has thus far not demonstrated.

There was joke going around during the construction of Rutan's Voyager round-the-world-nonstop-nonrefueled plane, back in the mid 80's. Nothing was spared to reduce weight on that project, because every pound of additional structure required six or seven pounds of additional fuel, requiring more structure, and so on. Unfortunately, that philosophy turned the cockpit into a bit of a hellhole. The saying was, though, that any more than 48 hours of survival was excess design capacity; unneeded for the record attempt.

thad