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Yes, it’s with a balloon that Nott and many of the scientists, innovators,
and entrepreneurs who collaborated over Eustace’s jump hope to punch your
ticket to the edge of the atmosphere and back. Nott swears the views there are
unparalleled and the perspectives are life-changing. Even better, the whole round
trip comes at a fraction of the cost and complexities of much more publicized
ventures into private space travel such as Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic,
whose SpaceShipTwo crashed just a week after Eustace accomplished his
mission. A pilot was killed in the misfire and another seriously injured.
That Eustace managed to soar deep into the stratosphere in a balloon
while Virgin Galactic’s rocket-propelled venture struggles to get off the
ground may well be a space-age version of the tortoise-and-hare fable. Or,
call it the revenge of the nerds. Either way, the story begins, like a lot of good
ones, in a nightclub with a pretty woman catching a young man’s eye while an
infuriatingly catchy song plays in the background.
The song was “Up, Up and Away”, the Jimmy Webb-penned classic bit
of sunshine pop recorded by The Fifth Dimension that cleaned up at the 1968
Grammys. Nott was the young man, then in his mid-20s, attempting to curry
favor with the comely daughter of a wealthy industrialist celebrating her birthday.
Knowing a Learjet to Rome would probably strike her as a pedestrian gesture
(not to mention out of his price range), and suddenly inspired by what he heard
over the sound system, Nott struck upon the perfect plan.
“I said, ‘You know what I’m going to give you for your twenty-first
birthday? I’m going to take you for a balloon ride,’” Nott recalls with
mischievously arched eyebrows. “I was just trying to impress a pretty girl with
a rich father. It made no difference to her, but… I went off on a balloon ride!”
FLYING ROCKETS AS A KID
B
allooning would eventually carry Nott to dozens of world records
and firsts and prove to be a career path that would eventually have
him working with the U.S. Navy, consulting with space agencies such as
NASA and JPL, and other high-tech companies, and pioneering accessible
space travel.
Before all that, though, he was just trying not to be an accountant.
And while that first balloon ride, the one that didn’t get the girl, opened
him up to a world of new possibilities, it also opened him up to conflict with
his Victorian-valued parents who were quite happy with Nott’s older brother,
who had chosen to become a respectable barrister. That Nott didn’t follow the
conventional route wasn’t entirely his fault.
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As a teenager, Julian Nott became fascinated with flight, building
model rockets and balloons in his backyard. By his early twenties,
Julian went beyond just building models and took up flying seriously
in balloons and fixed wing craft around the world, becoming the first
person to fly a balloon above all five continents. Julian served as
captain of his St. John’s College V111 crew (below right). Nott also
became an experienced skydiver... “just in case,” he says (below left).