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actual flights of fancy. What does that mean in the practical world? Well,
NASA followed Nott’s lead and worked out the kinks, so to speak. Now
super-pressure pumpkin balloons can achieve heights up to 120,000 feet
and stay aloft for up to two years depending on their size.
In fact, the scientific applications of balloons are growing
exponentially with innovations that Nott and others are bringing to the
field. But what, you might ask, can a balloon actually do? For starters, it
can cost a thousand times less than a satellite.
“The cheapest satellite is a couple hundred million and a big
balloon – the kind I help people with – costs a couple hundred thousand,
and you can fly for a time and you can fly comfortably at a hundred
thousand feet, and what’s interesting to a lot of scientists is
that at [that height] there’s about three percent of the earth’s
atmosphere left and there’s only one part in a million of the water
vapor,” explains Nott.
That means telescopes launched on balloons and sent
to that altitude can see a lot of things. They can analyze
spectrums of incoming light – kind of like carbon-dating the
universe. They can perform infrared, ultraviolet, and X-ray
astronomy. They can see radiation released from the Big Bang. They
can look for earthlike planets.
“A lot of important science is being done with balloons,” says Nott.
NOT ‘ENJOYABLE,’
BUT ALWAYS ‘SATISFYING’
B
y the mid-’80s, Nott’s fame had made its way to the colonies.
Shell Oil contracted with his company, known then as Aerospace
Development, to help build a huge dirigible about 1,500 feet long that
could fly up to 120 mph. The idea was to fill it up with natural gas in
Alaska, which would provide the airship’s lifting gas, and fly it to Los
Angeles where the cargo would be unloaded for refining. Then, the
craft would be sailed back to Alaska as a hot-air balloon. Shell spent $10
million on the project before scuttling it for more practical solutions.
During the Falklands War, the low-flying Exocet missile had proved
a scourge to big expensive ships that couldn’t pick the missiles up with
onboard radar. The U.S. Navy developed a gun that could shoot the
missile down, but tracking the missiles on radar was still a challenge.
Small missiles required big radar to pick them up. Nott’s group got a
contract to build blimps deploying Exocet missile-seeking radar that
would fly as part of carrier battle groups.
Advances in radar rendered that project moot before it got off the
ground, but the sum total of these projects, and others, was that Nott
found himself in New York almost as much as in London.
He made a particular point of being here for the Statue of Liberty’s
centennial in 1986. “When I first came here when I was just twenty years
old, the Statue of Liberty was just an interesting tourist attraction,” says
Nott. “By 1986, the Statue of Liberty was to me a huge symbol of the
very real liberties that Americans enjoy.”
By the time he met his wife-to-be, Anne Luther, a high-level
publicist for such brands as Revlon and Dom Pérignon, in 1988, Nott
was already a diehard New Yorker. “I knew there was no human life west
of the Hudson River,” he laughs.
After a decade or so in the Big Apple, though, Anne had other ideas.
“She said, ‘If I get a real job in Santa Barbara, will you move?’ I thought,
you’ll never get a real job in Santa Barbara. There’s no such thing.”
Fortunately, as it turns out, when the Bacara Resort opened up
around the turn of the millennium, it needed someone who was as savvy
UP
&
OUT
Julian was the Senior Balloon Consultant to the StratEx project that built and
designed the helium balloon that carried Google executive Alan Eustace
to a world-record-shattering 135,850 feet into the stratosphere and that he
detached from, reaching a top speed of more than 820 mph.