The Breitling Orbiter 3 wasn't very big, but it carried two men in the first nonstop balloon circumnavigation of the planet.
Courtesy Smithsonian Institution __1999: __ Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones land in the Egyptian desert, completing the first nonstop flight around the world in a balloon.
Piccard (grandson of balloon pioneer Auguste Piccard) and Jones took off March 1 from Chateau d’Oex, a village in the Swiss Alps that hosts an annual balloon festival.
The Breitling Orbiter 3 used the Roziére hybrid-balloon design, with separate chambers for a fixed lifting gas like helium and for hot air that can be replenished by heating it. Fully inflated, the balloon was 180 feet tall.
It carried a gondola 10 feet high and 17 feet long. The cabin was heated and pressurized much like a commercial jet aircraft. Accomodations included a single bunk and a pressure-operated toilet. Solar panels recharged batteries that provided electrical power.
Equipped with satellite communication and navigation systems, the craft flew at altitudes up to 36,000 feet. Jet-stream winds pushed it across the Pacific at up to 105 miles per hour.
The team's two previous attempts, the Breitling Orbiter in 1997 and Breitling Orbiter 2 in 1998, had fallen short of global circumnavigation, but Piccard and Jones succeeded this time. They traveled 28,431 miles before touching down 2 hours and 5 minutes shy of 20 days aloft.
(Steve Fossett's achievement three years later was the first solo nonstop balloon circumnavigation.)
The Orbiter 3 gondola now holds a place of honor in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., along with the Wright Brothers' plane, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, Chuck Yeager's sound-barrier-breaking jet, John Glenn's Mercury space capsule and the Apollo 11 command module from the first lunar landing.
(Source: National Air and Space Museum, others)
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