Two thirds of the way into his August 1998 attempt to fly round the world by balloon, Steve Fossett ran into a thunderstorm at 29,000 feet above the Coral Sea and began to plunge uncontrollably as wind and hail whipped his ruptured balloon. At 4,000 feet, he climbed through the hatch atop his capsule and cut away the fuel and oxygen tanks to slow the descent. Then he lay down on a bench to distribute the impending impact across his back. "I'm going to die," he said out loud.
I'd met Fossett the year before, and he was mild and Midwestern, a multimillionaire with no particular need for publicity. Now he was falling out of the sky in a broken balloon. Why? For that matter, why did another American businessman recently pay $20 million to get himself launched into space on a Russian rocket? Why do ordinary people climb Mount ...
