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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
THE SKY ABOVE
I
t was three years in the planning and when Google senior
vice president Alan Eustace lifted off the ground in the desert
outside Roswell, New Mexico, to begin his 135,890-foot
record-breaking balloon flight while dressed in a space suit as
cumbersome and complicated as those worn by NASA astronauts
during space walks, it was physicist and longtime Santa Barbara
resident Julian Nott who gave the nod to release Eustace from his
tethers.
Julian, with 79 official world records of his own, helped
design and oversee the construction of the 500-foot-long balloon
filled with helium and made of a thin Saran Wrap-like material
that expanded as it rose to a heretofore unreachable height. It was
Julian’s precise mathematical equations that allowed Mr. Eustace
to shatter a record that had been set less than two years before. Mr.
Nott, whose own record-breaking hot-air balloon flight of 55,134
feet was set in a pressurized cabin that he designed and flew and is
now on display at the National Geographic Air & Space Museum
in Washington, D.C.
Julian is an old friend of
Montecito Journal
, has appeared on
the cover of our weekly a number of times, and has penned his
space-based “Up And Out” column for our semi-annual glossy
edition for the past six years. We are proud to profile him and his
latest exploit.
THE EARTH BELOW
M
ontecito Journal
founder James Buckley and
his wife, Helen, spent a week meandering
down the Canal de Bourgogne aboard
the Aprés Tout, a renovated barge, piloted
by former Orient Express captain Rory Macrae. The six
passengers, catered to by a crew of four, covered some 125
kilometers overall and learned more about Burgundy than
they ever thought they would. We are pleased to publish Mr.
Buckley’s report.
Our usual Publisher’s Note send-off is “Welcome to the
neighborhood” and ordinarily refers to Montecito. In this
issue, however, our “neighborhood” is the sky above and the
ground below on this great big beautiful Earth of ours.
Tim Buckley
Publisher