Tomasz talked a lot about homecoming, about safety, about safe spaces. He described the stratosphere as a “deeply unfriendly void,” a cold place where the balloon and its payload were utterly alone. Except for the unseen, which might include “dust, microorganisms, ozone layers, radio waves,” and more. But for humans, Tomasz told me, it’s lonely, scary, empty, uninhabitable.
I pride myself on feeling not-at-home everywhere and nowhere, able to either blend in or stand out in an inoffensive manner, no matter the location or occasion. I don’t know what home is for me, despite having lived in the same city for a quarter century. And yet these days, snail-like, I feel my way in increments, retracting when needed.
In the gastropodic spirit of the season, therefore, I present you with recent slime.
The following is a transcript of an edited version of my audio interview with Tomasz Mis, a “PhD freshly baked,” as he often said. Tomasz was part of the BEXUS 33 student stratospheric balloon program at the Esrange Space Center, 40 miles above the Arctic Circle, near Kiruna, Sweden.
Tomasz initiated an experiment that was subsequently created by a team of students from the Warsaw University of Technology. There were four groups for BEXUS 32 and four for BEXUS 33. Each launched their experiments on one stratospheric balloon during the time I was there. The launch period is called the “campaign.”
Each team invents project names that combine to form acronyms, and the Warsaw University of Technology’s team acronym was TOTORO. They had a stuffed animal of the Miyazaki character and made sure it was prominently displayed in every photo.
Tomasz and I spoke at Esrange Space Center, Kiruna, Sweden, on September 22, 2023. The full interview lasted over an hour. This is a transcript of a 12 minute edit. So much great stuff got cut, but that is how it goes.
While I was filming, Tomasz shrank from the camera but was animated and ebullient in our audio interview. For that reason, I’ve abstained from including his image here.
When I experience these conversations they always operate in a space of dual meaning. I can’t help it. I am hearing someone talk about science and at the same time about art, about imagination, about similar searches for meaning while feeling the senselessness of the world all around. Trying to understand the invisible. About curiosity and discovery. About connection, or the hope of it. About wandering through.
Tomasz Mis:
“Well, I got interested in balloons, about the time I was beginning my first degree studies. It was after my baccalaureate, first through the airships, and then with the balloons and stratospheric balloons--they were quite frightening in the beginning, because they fly so high.
Of course, initially I read a lot about manned missions. But later on I discovered the unmanned missions, smaller probes that are able to lift up many different things, many different instrumentation to the edge of the dense atmosphere of the earth. And that this means of exploring the near space environment, it's quite easy, cost effective and accessible.
So when I heard that at my university, a balloon division is about to be formed at the Student Space Association at Warsaw University of Technology, I decided that, yes, I must go there. Because I'm interested in airships, I'm interested in balloons, so let's find out what is going to happen.
It's a great adventure to build something, even on your kitchen table: an apparatus that you invented for your science. To discover something, to measure, something to come up with, something new, like a fairy tale, and then launch it to the edge of the dense atmosphere where this device that you built is like completely alone in a completely empty space, there's nothing around it, there's just this little gondola with your experiment, with your construction, and something dark above it.
And below you just see the trace of the Earth’s atmosphere, that blue glow in the background and basically that's it. It's nearly nearly the edge of space, nearly because it is still accessible, very much accessible. But it is still like nearly space. It's still nearly so far away that it is nearly surreal to see that the thing that you built with your hands, that you invented, went up there, and it's doing science.
It was highly inspirational to begin building things like that, this is something I actually built on my kitchen table and it did some pretty amazing and never-invented-before experiments in this apparently empty space, then it came back to our hands. It was a little bit surreal. It was a little bit surreal to see this, this huge interface between the what we do here on ground and between the accessible space. But on a different level on a different scale, it's no longer something we built on the kitchen table, it's level up.
It floats away. Then we go to the ground station and we see, yeah, we have the connection. It's going, it's going and going, going higher, going higher, going higher and it's doing its job. We can't see it directly, but from the all the data that we got that we can build in our heads, a picture of how it is working, looking at the humidity, the temperature, the position. It all comes it all forms the nearly complete picture of how does it look like up there and this--this was otherworldly.
This is a kind of remote sensing of that environment. And when we’re here on the ground station, we have no cameras, we have no video we must kind of create a substitute for our senses up there. It's pretty atavistic, in my opinion, because a human being tries to perceive the environment: in order to know more about it, in order to control, it in order to relax, in order to reduce danger, in order to feel more comfortable.
And up there, we can't really do it, it's using all this real time data, all of us actually tries to build a sort of picture on how does it look like. It's an attempt to project actually to project our abilities to perceive the environment up there to the environment where humans can't really go by themselves. Not at least not without a special suit.
So here in this project I am the scientist of the project. I gave the idea that was later picked up by the team. I formed the basic set of requirements. What should be done and how. And the rest is done by the team and I'm just waiting here for the results.
So initially what I do is yeah, I create the idea, I inspire people, what can be done with it. Their imagination starts to run wild about it, both from emotional--because they are amazed by the program, stratospheric flight, space--but also those data that can be collected. So for me, the beginning of the project is very important right now and the finish of the project, so when the data arrives, I'm really excited about this data.
So yeah, the cutoff, it's—it's a pretty sad moment because we want the balloon to float like a cork on the on the surface of the sea for a very long time, but eventually the cutoff has to come because we either don't want to land in a hostile country or we don't want to land in the water. So we have to rely on the calculated descent path which imposes us the moment of the cutoff.
So the cutoff—so we have to like, shake ourselves away from the sad feeling. Oh, it's the end. But why? We want more… But we just switch to the mode that, yes, we are going back and it must go smoothly: by the book, by design, without any problems. We are going home with all this data with our experiment, our creation. It's going back to us. It's going back to Earth. After all this adventure.
And of course, the exploration of stratosphere in our case is remote. So we do not get a full experience of it as human beings, but we can try to build this image using the data that we have, and the rest is done by our imagination. So it is, yeah also, this kind of projection, of safely going home and finishing the adventure in our safe space.
Well, Marie Curie once said that one must learn not to, not to miss, not to make mistakes. But of course it's the very ultimate phase or level, let's say, that is often not reached at all. It's highly idealistic. Because it's also said that “only fools never make mistakes.” So we must remember to perceive any kind of failure as something that doesn't mean that we are worthless.
And yes, I remember that in BEXUS 22 in 2016 there was a team that did not have a sufficient redundancy in their equipment. They were using two small cameras and they used two cameras and both of them broke down. And it was maximum project failure for them. Maximum failure from the perspective of the hardware. And they weren't functional. They didn't do their experiment.
And I remember there was a lot of crying. I mean, one of the team members locked himself in the bathroom and he was crying like, like sobbing. It was horrible to hear and see. So we had to comfort him just a little bit. Of course, it was kind of, I wouldn't say futile because we can't repair it. But at least we could make him feel more, to soothe him just a little bit, making him feel a little bit more comfortable.
Because this was his creation. There was not only just the physics and mathematics and computing and computation, but also a lot of emotions. And these emotions, they burst at the time where where it, when it died, when it, when it was it was over, it was gone. It was no way to repair. There was no way to repair it.
This is one of the most difficult parts of the project. To somehow use the failures as an advantage and not as solely the thing that that brings people down, because it will bring people down. It's a disappointment, absolutely. But this may happen. This may happen. It's always non-zero probability that this this would happen.
JP: If you imagine being in the stratosphere, what do you imagine it would be like? I mean, if you could like, breathe and you know, not freeze or overheat.
TM: Empty, empty. There's nothing around us. It's a huge empty space that is kind of an interface between the actual space and--and the Earth’s atmosphere. So we see the traces of the earth like in the background the blue glow of the of the dense atmosphere and above us, we see that it's--it's dark. It's black, yeah, because the space is just above us.
So we see the Earth that is somewhere below, maybe there are clouds. Maybe there are some things below us that we could see on the surface of the planet, but it's not this planet anymore. We are nearly--we're nearly there. We're nearly on the orbit. That is why it's called the near space. So near space means we can still see the Earth and somehow relate to it. But it's also--it has also this emptiness of space, the emptiness of sounds, the almost, almost full lack of atmosphere.
Feeling that we're on the edge of--of escaping the planet. It would be like, yeah, and it's already a huge emptiness when we are on lower altitudes, we could see the clouds, traveling through the clouds, so there's something that is happening, OK. But up there, these mechanisms are long gone. We see that there is this thing that we built. And it's completely alone.
Emptiness, emptiness that is filled with different data that we could record—and radio waves and many other things, but--microorganisms, dust, ashes, ozone layers and--and stuff like that. But from a purely human perspective, it's it's a void. It's a deeply unfriendly void that is above the Earth. So yeah, the--the main feeling is the emptiness, the surrounding emptiness when you're above, above up there. It's it's weird, but it also otherworldly. Otherworldly is the keyword.
JP: What is the translation? What is the word?
TM: Space is kosmos, and adjective is—so space-related is kosmicznej. Near is bliszko. Bliszko kosmicznej.”
JP: Thank you so much.
After I got back to this place I am sitting now, having gone out and up and then falling back down to earth, my parachute dragging behind me, recovered from the swamps of my landing, I type in “near space” to the online translator. It doesn’t come out the way Tomasz said. But then I type in bliszko kosmicznej and reverse the language direction and it’s even better than I expected: close to cosmic.
Wishing you a gentle landing into the new year.
Thanks for reading.
As always, you can see my feature documentary BUNKER on a number of streaming platforms, including Mubi, Metrograph-at-Home, Amazon, and Projectr.tv.