The Real Great Leap

I've been thinking a lot about Explorers since my last post. Certainly exploration is intimate with extremism: extreme temperature, extreme height, extreme speed, extreme isolation. It is also a practice of firsts. After all, it matters little who the second man to climb Everest was or who made it most of the way to the North Pole. In that capacity, it represents our perhaps natural tendency to think in terms of binaries -- there is, to us, the one man who first sailed 'round Cape Horn, and then there is everyone else who didn't. Most people know little about the men who went to the moon after the Apollo 11 mission (although there were 24, in all, and 12 to walk on the surface), because those people were no longer the first.

I think, however, that there is a second level of Explorer, one that overlaps with the traditional "extreme and first" conception, but manages to shy away from its inherent binary. I hate that I'm about to use the following phrase, considering how heavily it was batted around in my liberal-arts years, but what I am alluding to, here, are explorers of the "liminal space." In a world where the most essential comfort comes from being one or the other -- us or them, if you will -- maybe the truly extreme thing is to explore whatever is in between those states. I'm not talking about this on a sexual or even a cultural level, though more power to anyone who introduces marginality into the mainstream. Rather, it's particularly frightening when people set out to explore physical places that are by nature indeterminate.

A good example is Joseph Kittinger, an American military pilot who, in August of 1960, parachuted from a hot-air balloon 102,800 feet above the Earth. It's hard to explain how far 102,800 feet above the Earth is: it's far beyond the limit the stratosphere, it's some 73,000 feet above what we call the "top of the Earth." Most importantly, it's outside the protective atmosphere of our planet, in the literal nether-zone at the very beginning of outer space. Where Kittinger jumped from, there's no blue sky, only black, and he could see the tops of our clouds thousands of feet below him. Wearing a special pressurized suit that had already sprung a leap, he fell for 4 1/2 minutes, at the speed of sound, through outer space before passing through the familiar clouds and into the thick atmosphere of Earth. I am not shitting you: although Yuri Gagarin got all the credit, Kittinger was the first man in space.

I saw the footage of his fall for the first time recently, on a particularly devastating episode of the 1999 BBC Series "The Planets," and it was genuinely horrific. Kittinger strapped a film camera to his suit before jumping, and the footage is unreal: as he falls, arms splayed, into the ether, the cloudy edge of the Earth tumbles in and out of the frame, in stark contrast to the total darkness of space. He was going so fast, apparently, that he didn't even feel as though he were falling -- it was only by looking at the rapidly receding hot-air balloon that he even realized which direction he was going in. Based on the theory of General Relativity, Albert Einstein knew that a man in the emptiness of space wouldn't be able to detect whether or not he was falling; he called this "a happy idea." From the looks of Kittinger's footage, however, it seems far from a happy state of being.

It is, however, liminal as all hell. What is more indeterminate than the space between the end of our planet and the beginning of outer space? Although Anne Herbert, who worked on the early versions of the Whole Earth Review, once said, "The sky starts at your feet. Think how brave you are to walk around," the dark void we associate with "space" doesn't really start until the end of our onion's skin of nitrogen and oxygen. I think Kittinger's feat isn't terrifying because of its extremity -- after all, men have lived in space, now -- but because the liminality of its location reminds us a little of something that frightens us: indeterminacy. At the same time, this act was temporally liminal, too, preceding the Apollo missions and seeming to augur the future well. Change is scary, and the period of transition between the age of Earth and the age of Space is characterized by its ambiguity, the way it dissolves our sense of national and species-identity. Kittinger's jump is disorienting, plunging right through the median of time and space, literally, but it gives us a unique perspective on what happened next.

Before someone beats me to it, yes, I know that the French Michel Fournier is planning to drop from 130,000 feet above the snowy fields of Saskatchewan in 2007, re-setting the world records for freefall and human balloon flights. His project is called the "Super Jump," or "Grand Saut," and though it will dwarf Kittinger's heroic leap, nothing about it smacks of "Exploration" to me. Sure, he's jumping from higher up, but he isn't the first to do it. Although it's an insane thing to do, it's not "extreme," either: Fournier's project is so gear-heavy, he'll even have a small space-craft with him, and now that we've sent probes to Venus, it's not that mind-boggling. Nor either does it address, in any capacity, the unknown or the in-between. If anything, Fournier's jump seems more in the tradition of daredevilsm than that of exploration. Knievel might be impressed, but this kind of feat of human extremist frivolity does not constitute an explorer.