Because Sometimes a Chicken Sandwich Needs to Get to Space

**Andrew Antonio** (0:01)
They've reached out to us and asked us if we could launch a chicken sandwich to the edge of space, where they would fly it across the country and video it the entire time, and you could log in to a website and see where the chicken sandwich was. Today, you've got thousands of satellites flying over your head. You don't even think about it. You do. I know you do. In the stratosphere, you don't really have that, and so we believe that you will in a decade, and that it'll be a second nature to you when there's dozens of balloons hovering over San Francisco as satellites above your head.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:46)
Today on Core Memory, we are going up into the stratosphere. We're going to talk balloons. There is a lot about balloon technology that I have oddly come to know over the years, and I would like you to know as well. We're going to be talking to Andrew Antonio. He's a guy I've known for ages. He's the co-founder of a company called Urban Sky, based in Colorado. They make these small balloons that can take photos, that can take measurements, to do all kinds of things with moderately sized payloads. And then Andrew has just been in the balloon business for a long time, so he's got good stories about doing weird things to people and objects up in the stratosphere. So I think you'll enjoy it. As always, please go visit Core Memory and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if that is where you like to get your videos and podcasts. And also, as always, we appreciate you listening.
How are you?

**Andrew Antonio** (1:53)
I'm good. Good to see you again, Ashlee. How are you?

**Ashlee Vance** (1:55)
We've known each other for quite a while now. Through balloons brought us together. Who would have thought?

**Andrew Antonio** (2:02)
It's a strange way to meet someone, but it's worked for us.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:05)
I didn't know whether to begin with sending a chicken sandwich to space or a human to space in a balloon, but I've decided to settle on the human, and then people will have to stay tuned for the chicken sandwich in space. Just to give people some context, unless I'm wrong, this project that was called StratX, which I think was 2012?

**Andrew Antonio** (2:32)
That's correct.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:33)
Right.
Was that your introduction to the balloon world? And can you tell people what you were doing with that?

**Andrew Antonio** (2:40)
Yeah. So I met my co-founder, Jared Leitek, in the desert of Roswell, New Mexico, where we were working on project StratX that broke the world record for the highest human balloon flight and skydive of all time. So Alan Eustace was Chief of Knowledge, SVP of Engineering at Google.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:58)
Yeah. Just like a Google dude.

**Andrew Antonio** (3:01)
Just a regular guy, for all intents, but he really is an incredible human. And he self-financed a project to... Well, let me back up. Everyone remembers the Red Bull space dive, I think, for the most part. If you don't look it up, it was a huge, mostly PR and scientific project that initially broke the world record for the highest human balloon flight and skydive ever.
And Alan really stepped in after that project, or kind of around the same time, there was some development going on. But Alan wanted to build a system and a spacesuit that would allow people to explore the stratosphere in much the same way that we scuba dive today. So he was really looking at it from an engineering lens and trying to solve hard engineering problems to make it more routine and easy for people to explore the stratosphere. And so that's where I sort of stepped into the ballooning world and I met my co-founder. Now, I will be honest, I was not scientifically important in any way to Stratx. My co-founder was, he led the spacesuit team for that project. But I was there supporting the operations team and it resulted in us breaking the world record. We flew Alan to 136,000 feet roughly above Earth and he skydived back down.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:19)
Yeah, I mean, like you said, people might remember the, I don't know why the Red Bull, I guess, just because probably they're pumping a ton of money into marketing, why people might remember that one more, but there's those images. I mean, it's somebody basically standing at the edge of where the atmosphere starts to give way to official space, right? And then they're just jumping out of a gondola, free falling.

**Andrew Antonio** (4:44)
That's exactly right. Yeah, and Red Bull, look, to their credit, they invested in a lot of incredible technology to make that happen. But it was mostly a publicity stunt to sell Red Bull, right? Whereas Alan took the perspective that he wanted to solve a lot of the really hard engineering problems that were not previously solved. Number one, you said Red Bull was jumping out of a capsule. Alan, we literally built a spacesuit and attached the spacesuit to the balloon with no capsule. Number one, that eliminated mass of the system so we could go higher. But number two, it eliminated a lot of the complexity and made it safer in a sense to execute the mission.