Even though the US Navy cancelled Jean Piccard’s stratospheric plastic balloon cluster-based Project Helios in the first half of 1947 (its first flight had been planned for the 21st June 1947, the summer solstice), that was far from the end of its influence on ballooning. I’ve already posted (back in 2022) about how its innovative cluster rings got absorbed into Project Mogul.
Otto Winzen, who had been part of Project Helios, also moved on. Many of the same military / scientific projects that had been trying to hitch a ride on Project Helios’ stratospheric balloons were looking for other ways up. Winzen, who had carried on working with polyethylene balloons and designing lightweight gondolas, proved well-placed to pick up follow-on contracts.
And so it should not be a surprise that many of the gondola design features that Tex Settle and Charles Burgess had tried to build in the early 1930s reappeared in Winzen’s next major gondola…
Project MANHIGH
There were three Project MANHIGH flights to the stratosphere, and all three used Winzen’s gondola:
- Kittinger, June 1957
- Simons, August 1957
- McClure, October 1958
The original Settle/Burgess capsule was (described as being) 7ft long, but I always thought that would have been tight on space: any real stratospheric flight would need a CO2 scrubber, a heater, radio equipment etc etc. Here, you can see that the MANHIGH gondola is 8ft high (long) and with a diameter of 3ft (2.4m x 0.9m) which, while far from luxurious, was (just) enough to contain all the equipment needed.
As I understand it, the shell was made of 1/8th inch aluminium alloy, and was filled with pressurised oxygen (60%), nitrogen (20%), and helium (20%). Here’s a picture of it in the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base OH, looking every bit the unhappy Dalek prototype:
The famous story is that even though the first flight was due to last twelve hours, an oxygen leak caused Colonel Stapp and Otto Winzen to terminate the flight after only two hours, much to the displeasure of Captain Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr at 28,956m high, who gruffly replied “[so] [c]ome and get me” .
This was, of course, every bit as much a “Flying Coffin” as the Settle/Burgess gondola that had (kind of) preceded it. But it did the job, and inched the US that little bit closer to space.