Project Stargazer Takes Flight
Project Stargazer was a joint effort between the U.S. Navy, Air Force, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Begun just a year before the creation of NASA, the project’s engineers and scientists had to develop a way to mount a working telescope to the roof of a balloon’s gondola.
This was no easy feat. The telescope was exposed to the open air of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Plus, a balloon drifts, spins and tilts, meaning that engineers had to figure out how to stabilize and point the telescope while it was moving unpredictably.
A few other efforts had already managed to successfully mount telescopes to balloons. These early balloon flights managed to image the Sun in unprecedented detail, as well as make high-resolution observations of the larger cosmos that were hard to get from ground-based telescopes.
White was a veteran of one of these earlier efforts. He had served in the Air Force during World War II before going on to study astronomy at The Ohio State University. Soon afterward, he found himself working as a naval researcher on Project Strato-lab, which was being used to pioneer new experiments in the upper atmosphere and test the technology needed to keep humans alive at those altitudes. The Strato-Lab team was laying the groundwork for humanity’s move to orbit.
White’s role on the project was to help develop scientific instruments that could be attached to the outside of the balloon gondola to measure radiation exposure — and the larger team’s efforts were successful. The data they gathered showed that astronauts would be subjected to high-energy particles from solar flares, which could harm their bodies. In fact, a version of the suits worn by the Strato-Lab pilots would ultimately be chosen for NASA’s Mercury astronauts.
The final Strato-Lab flight came on May 4, 1961, when Malcolm Ross and Victor Prather ascended to 113,000 feet in an open-air gondola with a "temperature-control system" that amounted to a pair of Venetian blinds. Nonetheless, the mission was initially successful, providing the most intense test yet of the spacesuit prototype. But tragically, Prather drowned as the men were recovered from the gondola at sea. And unintentionally throwing salt on the wound, the next day, NASA launched the first American into space, Alan Sheppard, breaking the Ross and Prather's briefly held record for highest U.S. altitude flight.
Much like test pilots for aircraft at the time, test pilots for balloons likewise had incredibly dangerous jobs. Anyone who undertook the journey understood the risks.