Manfred “Dutch” von Ehrenfried - Stratospheric Balloons: Science and Commerce at the Edge of Space (Springer Praxis Books)

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The following are comments by three eminent scientists who spent their early formative careers launching instruments and payloads on balloons into the stratosphere.

Dr. John C. Mather and Dr. George F. Smoot shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the Cosmic Background Explorer that led to the discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. As an astronaut, Dr. John M. Grunsfeld helped to service and repair the Hubble Space Telescope. He went on to become NASAs Chief Scientist.

Their balloon experiences surely made lasting impressions on them and helped to define their scientific interests and future paths. They are truly an inspiration for young students and future scientists, as well as to those who are already involved in ballooning.

Dr. John C. Mather

Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory

NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center

I got my start in scientific ballooning at the University of California , Berkeley. I was looking for a Ph.D. thesis project in 1970, after two years of graduate school classes on particle physics and relativity and quantum mechanics and studying in the library, and I was giving up on my dream of being a theoretical physicist like Richard Feynman. I really wanted to build something. I felt my hands itching to hold a screwdriver. I found Paul Richards and Charles Townes and Mike Werner, who were all thinking about how to measure the newly discovered Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. I said yes, I want to play! So the first project was to build an instrument and take it up to White Mountain in eastern California, on the east side of the Owens Valley. We built it and it worked, and we learned a new technology, but it wasnt surprising, it just agreed with expectations that the cosmic background seemed to have a temperature of about 3 degrees Kelvin.

Then Paul went off to England for a sabbatical and came back with an idea for a balloon payload that could get an instrument above most of the interference of the Earths atmosphere. It would be a satellite on a string, as I called it. The plan was to make a new kind of interferometer, which Paul had learned about in England, called a Polarizing Martin-Puplett, and use it as a spectrometer. It would measure the temperature of the cosmic background radiation at wavelengths from about 0.5 mm to 5 mm if we were lucky. It would have to be immersed in a bath of liquid helium, it would have to fly to an altitude of 40 km, and it would have a window that would open up after the payload had reached the target altitude. It had all the ingredients of a satellite, except it wasnt going to really be in outer space. It had a big battery (although no solar cells, it wouldnt operate in the daytime), a radio transmitter and receiver, some command processors, a magnetometer so that we would know which way we were pointing, electronics boxes to operate the motors and detectors, and a big rotating momentum wheel to control the orientation. It fit inside a 2 m cubical frame made of aluminum. We built it up and tested it in the lab at Berkeley until it seemed to work the way we hoped and expected. David Woody and I were now the lab partners working on it, so we loaded it into a big yellow university truck and drove it to the National Scientific Balloon Facility at Palestine , TX.