Alan Eustace, Google's former SVP of Engineering, self-financed Project StratEx to set the world record for highest human balloon flight and skydive. Unlike Red Bull's publicity stunt, StratEx attached the spacesuit directly to the balloon, eliminating a capsule to reduce mass and complexity, aiming to make stratospheric exploration routine like scuba diving.
Yeah, so I met my co-founder Jared Leidich in the desert of Roswell, New Mexico, where we were working on Project Stratix that broke the world record for the highest human balloon flight and skydive of all time. So Alan Eustace was, uh, Chief of Knowledge, SVP of Engineering at Google.
Yeah, just like a Google dude.
Just a regular guy for all intents, but he really isn't. He's an incredible human and, he, he self-financed a project to, um, well, every— let me back up. Everyone remembers the Red Bull, uh, space dive, I think, for the most part. If you don't, look it up. It was a, a huge, mostly PR and scientific project that, uh, initially broke the world record for the, the highest human balloon flight and skydive ever. And, and Alan really stepped in after that project, or kind of around the same time. There was some development going on, but Alan wanted to build a system and a spacesuit that would allow people to explore the stratosphere in much the same way that we scuba dive today. So he was really, you know, looking at it from an engineering lens and trying to solve hard engineering problems to make it more routine and easy for people to, to explore the stratosphere. And so that's where I sort of stepped into the ballooning world and I met my co-founder. Now, I will be honest, I was not scientifically important in any way to StratEx. Uh, my co-founder was, he led, uh, the spacesuit team for that, that project. But, um, I was there supporting the operations team and, uh, it resulted in us breaking the world record. We, we flew Alan to 136,000 feet roughly above Earth and, uh, he skydived back down.
Yeah. And like, I mean, like you said, people might remember the, I don't know why the Red Bull, I guess just cuz probably they're pumping a ton of money into marketing, why people might remember that one more, but, but But, um, there's those images. I mean, you— it's somebody basically standing at the edge of where the atmosphere starts to give way to official space, right? And then they're just jumping out of a gondola, free falling.
That's exactly right. Yeah. And Red Bull, look, to their credit, they invested in a lot of incredible technology to make that happen. But it was mostly a publicity stunt to sell Red Bull, right? Whereas Alan took the perspective that he wanted to solve a lot of the really hard engineering problems that were not previously solved. Number one, you, you just said Red Bull was jumping out of a capsule. Alan, we literally built a spacesuit and attached the spacesuit to the balloon with no capsule. Number one, that eliminated what mass of the system so we could go higher. But number two, it eliminated a lot of the complexity and, and made it safer in a sense to, uh, execute the mission.
