A well-known computer scientist parachuted from a balloon near the top of the stratosphere on Friday, Oct. 24, falling faster than the speed of sound and breaking the world altitude record set just two years ago. The jump was made by Alan Eustace, 57, a senior vice president of Google.
Times reporter John Markoff was at the abandoned runway at a New Mexico airport where Mr. Eustace lifted off — in a balloon filled with 35,000 cubic feet of helium — and wrote about Mr. Eustace’s feat in Saturday’s paper. Here he gives Insiders a full sense of the story behind the story.
Google and Me: A Short History
Since their days in a garage in Menlo Park, Calif., I have had what might be called a “nuanced” relationship with Google.
I was invited to the garage on Willow Road in 1998 and may have been the first reporter to speak with Sergey Brin and Larry Page about the search engine they were building. At the time it was impossible to pick which company would be the premiere search engine, and beyond vague memories of a jumble of computers, the meeting didn’t leave a huge impression. And, because there were so many other search engines bouncing around Silicon Valley at that moment, I chose not to write about Google in its earliest start-up phase. This is one of my biggest regrets as a reporter.
Several years later, Google was growing rapidly and was anxious to hide this fact from the world (and mostly from Microsoft).
In a 2003 piece I wrote with G. Pascal Zachary, the Times was the first to report that Google’s revenues were approaching $1 billion annually and that they were hard at work on a smartphone. The story infuriated the young founders, particularly Larry Page, and suspected leakers were fired.
There was a tense period when the company’s chief executive Eric Schmidt invited an Associated Press reporter to Google’s campus to scoop a Times exclusive about a new Google product. Several years later when Larry Page discovered that I had learned about the Google Car project he flew into a rage, but the company ultimately chose to cooperate with The Times and even gave me a ride in the car.
Google Executive with ‘Wacky’ Side Daydreams About Swimming in the Stratosphere
By 2013, I had moved to The Times’s Science section and I had not been the beat reporter covering the company for a number of years.
Last fall, I had got a curious call from the company: A Google public relations employee called to ask if I was interested in reporting on the personal project of one of their top executives. Alan Eustace, a computer scientist who had been closely involved in building Google’s search infrastructure, was planning to parachute to earth from the top of the stratosphere.
Mr. Eustace was not seeking publicity before he jumped. Rather, he wanted to bring one reporter in ahead of time to get a sense of the project. I said I would be happy to visit Mr. Eustace. I basically heard nothing for another year.
I spoke with Mr. Eustace’s friends and colleagues who described a well-liked engineer who takes risks in his personal life and in high-difficulty engineering projects. And someone who had something of a “wacky” side.
When I spoke with Mr. Eustace, he told me that he had begun daydreaming about the idea while he was still in high school. He was already a parachutist and he began to wonder about the idea of being able to move around in the stratosphere with the same freedom that scuba divers move beneath the surface of the ocean.
Mr. Eustace’s launch was scheduled for dawn on the morning of Oct. 24. I flew to Albuquerque, rented a car and made the three hour drive through the New Mexico desert. It is a LONG straight boring drive.
Mr. Eustace Blasts Off
At 5:30 a.m. on Friday, I walked with a group of other observers and friends of the project onto the abandoned runway where floodlights cast bright shadows on a giant truck holding helium tanks that would be used to inflate the balloon; I was the only reporter in the group.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Eustace was wheeled by on a tractor. He lay face down in the suit until just moments before the balloon was launched and then he was attached by a cable.
Precisely at 7 a.m., the launch took place.
It was something of an anticlimax. There was no fiery blast of rockets. Instead, Mr. Eustace was released and rose into the night sky silently and at a rapid clip, starting out at over 1,000 feet per minute.
I went with my group of observers to the trailer where we viewed his progress on a control console laid out on a computer screen. It showed mission date in dials and presented a small image from a GoPro camera that hung over his suit and pointed downward. It took him slightly over two hours to reach his maximum altitude. As he got higher the image got fuzzier and fuzzier until he disappeared entirely.
Just before he jumped the image came back for perhaps two seconds, long enough to see him cut loose and vanish below almost instantly.
Contemplating Failure
I had largely avoided thinking about what I would write if it didn’t work. It would have been a very difficult time. Two of Mr. Eustace’s sisters had come to watch the launch as well as his best friend. His wife and children were back home in California.
Success! Mr. Eustace Falls Farther Than Any Other Person
The suspense lasted all of four and a half minutes. First we heard the chase teams say that they had heard a sonic boom. With only a tiny drogue shoot to stabilize him he had fallen 123,414 feet from an altitude of 135,890. He had fallen from higher and longer than any other human.
When the chase helicopters reported they could see a parachute, cheers erupted in the trailer.
For me, this was when the hardest part of the story began. Pinning down the exact altitude that he jumped from proved a minor nightmare. The paper’s editors were clamoring for me to send information, but it turned out that the real data would not be available until Mr. Eustace and his spacesuit returned to the base by helicopter. As a result the paper posted several approximate numbers, which immediately ricocheted around the Internet.
Finally, the helicopter arrived and Mr. Eustace who is 57 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall and with graying hair, climbed out in a blue uniform, looking every bit like someone who had just come from the edge of space.