To the Stratosphere and Beyond
Whether by balloon or spacecraft, U of M alumni fueled by curiosity have risen to astounding heights.
Throughout her life, Jeannette Piccard (Ph.D. ’42) above at left, never lost her sense of adventure. Her quest for exploration led to many firsts—the first licensed American woman balloon pilot, the first woman to fly into the stratosphere, and the first woman ordained an Episcopal priest in the United States.
Together with her husband, Jean, a longtime U of M professor in aeronautical engineering, the Piccards were pioneers in high-altitude balloon aviation. During their flights, Jeannette served as pilot while Jean, who was from a family of balloonists, gathered scientific data.
On October 23, 1934, the couple made a groundbreaking flight. Jeannette piloted their hydrogen balloon to an altitude of 57,579 feet into the stratosphere, inspiring many to call her the first woman pilot in space—a record she’d hold for 29 years until Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth in 1963.
A long legacy
When the Piccards first arrived at the U of M in 1936, Jean became a professor, teaching until his retirement in 1952. Jeannette worked on ballooning projects with him while earning her doctorate in education. (Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the “Star Trek Next Generation” series was supposedly named after Jean.)
And while Jeannette clearly proved her mettle as a balloon pilot, not everyone supported a woman explorer.
“She was turned down a lot by people, especially funders or sponsors,” says James Flaten (Ph.D. ’97), a contract professor in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University and associate director of NASA’s Minnesota Space Grant Consortium. “National Geographic became somewhat infamous for saying ‘no’ to funding for this [1934] flight because they didn’t want to put a woman and a mother at risk in such a dangerous endeavor. They didn’t seem to mind putting men at risk. ... They [the Piccards] ultimately got funding for the flight from Henry Ford and several companies.”
The Piccards’ work was also a stepping stone for other discoveries at the University.
Phyllis St. Cyr Freier (B.S. ’44, Ph.D. ’50), an astrophysicist who spent almost her entire career at the U of M, is celebrated on the U of M Scholars Walk for her work on cosmic rays using the plastic high-altitude balloons the Piccards developed. Fellow physicist Edward Ney (B.S. ’42) is also on the Scholars Walk for similar work, using their balloons to measure high energy particles.
Even though she was never on the faculty, Jeannette’s impact on students was profound. Robert Gilruth (B.S. ’35, M.S. ’36) collaborated with the Piccards and was greatly influenced by them. In 1937, he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which would later become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Often called the father of human space flight, Gilruth became director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in 1961, overseeing 25 manned spaceflights over a 10-year period.
After Jean died in 1963, Gilruth hired Jeannette as a NASA consultant. “She never did get a standard faculty position, but she did eventually work for NASA, and that was because Gilruth knew that she was the brains behind the outfit in large part,” says Flaten, noting that the Piccards’ youngest son, Don, became an innovative balloonist in his own right.
Jeannette was in her late 70s when she made history yet again, adding another first to her impressive roster of achievements. In 1974, at age 79, Jeanette was ordained as the first woman priest in the Episcopal church, fulfilling a childhood dream. She died in 1981.
Another NASA connection
Overlapping with both Jeannette and Gilruth at NASA was Donald Kent “Deke” Slayton (B.S. ’49), chosen in 1959 as one of the original Mercury 7, America’s first astronauts. (Gilruth, head of the Space Task Group at that point, played a major role in choosing the Mercury 7 crew.)
Unfortunately, before Slayton could travel into space, doctors found a previously undiagnosed heart issue that grounded him. Even though he didn’t make the flight, Slayton remained closely involved with the astronauts at NASA—eventually becoming director of flight crew operations, overseeing the crew selection of manned space flights, including the historic Apollo 11 mission, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon.
The 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton, depicts a dangerous and tense lunar mission launched in April 1970. On the fifth crewed trip to the moon, an oxygen tank exploded on board, creating immediate danger for astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise. The trip had to be aborted, and the crew faced significant challenges trying to return to earth. Slayton, director of flight crew operations at the time, is played by actor Chris Ellis in the film.
Eventually, Slayton was cleared for flight by doctors, making it to space in 1975 on the Apollo-Soyuz mission. In 1984, he and his Mercury 7 colleagues created the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which awards scholarships to college students around the country who are studying mathematics, science, or engineering. At the U of M, 40 students have received the scholarship.
On the U of M Scholars Walk, pages from Slayton’s 1970 notebook depict his thoughts on astronaut crews, including selecting Armstrong and Aldrin for the first lunar landing.
William Garrard, professor emeritus and former head of the University’s Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics department, knew Slayton, interacting with him when he’d come to the University for speaking engagements. “He was a down-to-earth individual who grew up in small-town Wisconsin,” he says. “He was a free spirit and very talkative—he would say practically anything.”
The Piccards, Gilruth, and Slayton are all inductees in the International Space Hall of Fame. Slayton died in 1993.
To 'near space': the picCard legacy today
Ninety years after Jean and Jeannette Piccard (Ph.D. ’42) set a record flying nearly 11 miles into the stratosphere, the University’s Stratospheric Ballooning Team continues the tradition of balloon exploration. Instead of riding in a gondola, students build scientific payloads carried by high-altitude balloons to gather data, photography, and video.
James Flaten (Ph.D. ’97), a contract professor in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics and NASA’s Minnesota Space Grant Consortium associate director, advises the team and leads freshman seminars on ballooning.
“I love doing activities with freshmen,” says Flaten, who’s had students go on to work at NASA. “We build and fly high-power rockets. We build payloads and use weather balloons to carry them. And in the case of stratospheric ballooning, these are really spacecraft. Basically, we refer to this as ‘near space’ because it looks and feels like outer space.”
Students launch weather balloons, like the ones used by the National Weather Service, to transport payloads into the atmosphere too high for airplanes to fly but too low for orbital spacecraft, Flaten says.
In April 2024, the team traveled to Indiana to be in the path of totality for the solar eclipse, joining ballooning teams from across the country. They released balloons with scientific payloads to document the time the moon blocked the sun, and the U of M team captured images of the eclipse shadow by “parking” a balloon at 80,000 feet during the event.
This summer, Flaten and his students also brought ballooning to a group of middle school students from Minneapolis, helping them build their own payloads to measure everything from pressure and humidity to temperature and ultraviolet light intensity. They were carried by balloons 112,000 feet into the atmosphere.
“We go higher than they [the Piccards] ever did, but we don’t send people up, so our balloons can be significantly smaller,” Flaten says. “I think the Piccards would be very tickled and pleased with the fact that students still get involved in ballooning at the University of Minnesota.”
And in another first, in July Assistant Professor Oggy Ilic’s mechanical engineering group sent the new Minnesota state flag on its first flight to near space.
A team of engineers launched cameras and data sensors into the stratosphere from Montgomery, Minnesota. The experiment was designed to determine how materials fabricated at the U of M’s Minnesota Nano Center behaved outside the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere—particularly how they reacted to radiation and cosmic rays.
—ACG
Duane 'Digger' Carey
“Deke was one of the two astronauts that graduated from the University—both were from our department,” Garrard says. “The other was Duane ‘Digger’ Carey, who was my master’s student ... [It] adds some prestige to a department to have people who become astronauts.”
Carey (B.A.E.M. ’81, M.S.A.E. ’82) retired from the U.S. Air Force as a lieutenant-colonel. He was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in April 1996. After completing two years of training and evaluation, he qualified for flight assignment as a pilot. He piloted the space shuttle Columbia on a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002.
While Carey never personally met Slayton, he learned more about him in Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff, which recounted the story of pilots involved in postwar aircraft testing. (The book was made into a film of the same name in 1983.) And when Carey was at NASA, he says staff told him he reminded them of Slayton.
Carey says he admires and identifies with the perseverance Slayton displayed throughout his journey to become an astronaut. Many people, he says, would have given up after being initially denied a chance to fly to space.
“He took on a leadership role and played an important role in space exploration,” says Carey. “And, as luck would have it, he did get his chance. He stuck with it. It was something he knew was important. He never gave up.”
These days, Carey travels across the country, speaking at seminars, meetings, and to K-12 classes, sharing space travel stories with students and encouraging them to work hard in school to achieve their dreams.
When Carey thinks about the connection between the Piccards, Gilruth, Slayton, and himself, he says it’s about a shared commitment to furthering discovery. “These people that have helped move mankind forward in terms of exploration and getting closer to developing colonies and eventually civilizations off the surface of the earth—that’s God’s work,” he says. “There aren’t many of us that have done that but thank goodness we live in a country and in a world where people get to work on exploration and moving things forward ... we can afford to have some very skilled, able people involved in things that don’t have an immediate payoff."
If you liked these stories, Minnesota Alumni magazine publishes four times a year highlighting U of M alumni and University activities. Early access to stories and a print subscription are benefits of being an Alumni Association member. Join here to receive a printed copy at home.
