Bust in a Bowl

One afternoon last week there was something like pandemonium in Rapid City, S. Dak. Sirens screamed; storekeepers thrust exuberant signs in windows; offices closed early. By midnight most of Rapid City and the surrounding countryside had trekked southwest to the rim of Moonlight Valley, a woodsy pockmark in the Black Hills. There a hushed throng of 50,000 stared down into a floodlit bowl as Explorer II, latest & greatest stratosphere balloon, was made ready for its first ascent. Year ago Explorer I, latest & greatest of its day, had lurched reluctantly skyward from the same natural amphitheatre near Rapid City. At 60,000 ft. the great bag had popped open, plummeted in tatters. Saving themselves by last minute parachuting, the three balloonists lost most of their scientific data, admitted the flight was a failure.

All known faults of Explorer I were eliminated in Explorer II. The bag was 23% larger, of stronger fabric, better sewn, better reinforced. Folding, cause of last year's disaster, was carefully avoided. Instead of explosive hydrogen, safe helium gas was chosen. Equally improved was everything else. By June 5, these preparations had cost the U. S. Army Air Corps and the National Geographic Society, joint sponsors of the flight, some $175,000. Then for a month Captains Orvil A. Anderson and Albert W. Stevens twiddled impatiently, waiting for good weather on high. Last week it came. Joyfully, the camp went to work. Without shoes and wearing cotton gloves to protect the rubbery fabric, 300 soldiers gingerly smoothed out the bag, examined every inch for adhesions. After supper they started valving in gas. Soon the balloon humped in the middle, commenced to rise. By 3 a. m. with all the gas in, the bag was a swaying 300-ft. column glistening in the floodlights. The gondola was wheeled beneath. To the crowd along the rim above it looked as if everything were about complete.

Suddenly the top of the bag pimpled, popped. An instant later the whole crown split open, and 350,000 cu. ft. of helium roared out. An Army sergeant on the gondola understood the crisis first, frantically yelled, "Run! Run! She's busted!" Before any of the 20 men under the bag could do so, they were flattened by nearly three acres of billowing, stifling cloth.

Appalled, the rest of the ground-crew, led by Balloonists Anderson and Stevens, dashed into the still-settling debris, speedily dragged out all the buried men, found none injured. The gondola, too, survived safely, but the bag, ripped, tumbled, knotted, was badly damaged. As the crowd on the rim of the bowl filtered away in the dawn, the camp gloomily began to pick up the pieces of one more false start into outer space.

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