Taking Sky Diving to the Next Level With 'Space Diving'

Sept. 27, 2007 — -- As companies work toward rocketing paying passengers into space and back on commercial spaceships, one firm plans on doing it with a twist.

Instead of riding the ship back down to Earth, passengers will jump off it, hurtling through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds until their parachute deploys and they glide safely down to their home planet.

That's the idea behind Space Diver, a company aiming to develop a spacesuit that can survive jumps from amazingly high altitudes.

Spearheading the effort is Rick Tumlinson, an entrepreneur and longtime advocate of private spaceflight. He was a founding trustee of the Ansari X Prize, which awarded $10 million for sending the first private reusable manned craft into space in 2004.

Tumlinson says the suit's initial purpose will be to outfit the ultimate extreme sport of space diving, with the eventual goal of using the suit as a kind of high-altitude life vest for spacefarers in trouble.

His other company, Orbital Outfitters, designs spacesuits for the crew and passengers of commercial spaceships. In a few months, Orbital Outfitters is set to deliver its first prototype suit to XCOR Aerospace, one of about a dozen firms hoping to start selling tickets for spaceflights within the next few years.

Those suits will be designed for protection in an emergency, complete with full pressurization and oxygen supply, but they are by no means a space-diving suit.

"In one of them, you're sitting comfortably in a vehicle," Tumlinson said. "In the other one, you are the vehicle."

Tumlinson compares the suits that his two sister companies are designing to parachutes. "A parachute is both a safety device and a sporting device," he said. "Advances at either end support the other, and that's the way we're treating this. We're going to be pushing the boundaries of extreme sport, and we're going to be pushing the boundaries of extreme safety."

Also on Tumlinson's team is Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon who is now at Baylor Medical College's National Space Biomedical Research Institute. He has a personal interest in exploring how to return from space without a ship — his wife, astronaut Laurel Clark, died in the Columbia tragedy.