The quest for the cosmic ray was a four-ring circus last week. The main purpose of Belgian Professor Auguste Piccard’s stratosphere balloon flight (see p. 32) was to record the effect of cosmic rays ...

When newsmen at Zurich, Switzerland last week wondered why Professor Auguste Piccard continued to postpone his balloon ascension into the stratosphere, even when weather appeared favorable, the ...

There are explorers who plumb great depths: Bob Ballard, Jacques Cousteau, or even James Cameron. Then there are adventurers who take to the skies: Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong, and Amelia Earhart, ...

We think of human flight as a relatively modern affair, with a few claims to the first airplane all around the turn of the last century. But people flew much earlier than that by using hot air ...

As a boy, he waved as his parents floated away in a hydrogen-filled balloon, up to the very edge of space. And throughout his long life, Don Piccard became a balloon pioneer himself, an innovator, ...

This collection consists of photographs, correspondence, reports, clippings and press kits, mostly centering on the following ballooning topics: Project Skyhook, Project Helios, Stratoscope I and II ...