Comments by "John Luetjen" (@jehl1963) on "Highest Altitude Balloon Record" video.

  1. Related but different -- as a Kid I remember my Dad had an an old National Geographic with a picture of a couple of men trying to escape from a spherical gondola as a balloon plummeted to earth. Your episode prompted me to look it up, and it was the January 1963 issue with a painting of "The high drama of the escape from Explore I". Explorer 1 and II were a series of 2 balloon altitude missions from July 1934, when they reached an altitude of 18,475 meters/60,613 feet. The balloon developed a tear which resulted in the capsule plummeting to the ground. The latter Explorer II would reach 22,066 meters/ 72,395 feet and resulted in the crew becoming the first humans to witness the curvature of the Earth's surface. Maybe a subject for a future episode!
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