The highest skydive in history was not the Red Bull jump. In October 2014, Alan Eustace, a computer scientist and senior vice president at Google, rose to 135,890 feet under a helium balloon wearing only a spacesuit and let go, breaking Felix Baumgartner's world record and the sound barrier on the way down. People on the ground heard the sonic boom. Unlike the Red Bull Stratos livestream watched by millions, Eustace did it in near secrecy with one reporter present, John Markoff of The New York Times. In this episode of the Core Memory podcast, Eustace gives Ashlee Vance the full story of the StratEx jump: the Joe Kittinger and John Paul Stapp history that inspired it, the three years of secret engineering with Paragon Space Development, the test jump where everything went wrong, the goodbye videos his wife made him record for their kids, and the crash landing that put his spacesuit in the Smithsonian.
Eustace also happens to be one of the great figures in computing history. He worked at Digital Equipment Corporation in its heyday, joined Google around employee 50, and helped build the data center infrastructure that still runs much of the internet. He tells the story of hiring Franz Och without an interview to build Google Translate, explains why AI is a revolution on the scale of the microprocessor and the internet, and why he thinks cancer will not be solved by an LLM. These days he sits on the board of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which he says is about to prove fusion power is real, and runs Aqua Satellite, a small company building autonomous underwater drones to explore the ocean floor, find MH370, and finish his search for Amelia Earhart.
SPONSORS
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ABOUT THE HOST
Core Memory is hosted by Ashlee Vance, a two time New York Times best selling author and filmmaker who has spent more than twenty years covering science and technology for The Economist, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He wrote the best selling biography of Elon Musk, created the Emmy nominated series Hello World, and produced HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die. With Core Memory, he drops into the labs, garages, factories, and hangars where scientists, inventors, oddballs, and startups are building the future.
LINKS
Aqua Satellite: https://aquasatellite.com
Commonwealth Fusion Systems: https://cfs.energy
14 Minutes from Earth (the documentary on the jump): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5626716/
John Markoff's New York Times story on the jump: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/science/alan-eustace-jumps-from-stratosphere-breaking-felix-baumgartners-world-record.html
Eustace's spacesuit at the Smithsonian: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/new-high-altitude-jump
Paragon Space Development Corporation: https://www.paragonsdc.com
Space Perspective: https://spaceperspective.com
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CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
03:26 Chasing Alan Eustace
07:42 Rocket Sleds and Seatbelts
10:38 Why Build a Capsule?
13:00 Kittinger's Three Jumps
18:11 The Idea Takes Hold
21:07 Elon's Mars Greenhouse
23:18 The Jump That Failed
28:37 Solving the Death Spin
30:07 Racing Red Bull
32:26 One Reporter, No Livestream
34:12 The Kittinger Coincidence
38:26 Not Your Typical Daredevil
40:43 Goodbye Videos for His Kids
44:35 The First Spacesuit Jump
48:37 Two Hours to Space
50:53 Google Earth in Reverse
54:36 Can I Get a Countdown?
58:55 Breaking the Sound Barrier
1:00:08 The Crash Landing
1:02:16 What It Really Cost
1:08:28 The Magic of Gas Balloons
1:10:30 Did the Jump Change Him?
1:17:03 The VLSI Golden Age
1:22:56 Is AI Revolutionary?
1:29:20 The Google Translate Story
1:35:49 The Fall of DEC
1:41:09 Reinventing the Data Center
1:48:51 Impossible to Inevitable
1:51:40 Inside Commonwealth Fusion
1:56:21 Hunting Amelia Earhart
2:03:21 What's Under the Golden Gate?
