“What are these giant plates for?” I requested.
“No one here has any idea,” stated Shaw. “We can only guess. This chamber is a Cold War baby. All we know is it was built for a big aerospace company.”
Shaw defined that inside minutes he may depressurize the within of this chamber to the equal atmospheric stress of 85,000 toes above sea degree and funky it down to –100 levels Fahrenheit. The partitions had to be stable metal a foot thick so the chamber wouldn’t implode. In different phrases, regardless that it was sitting on a concrete slab in Southern California, it may successfully mimic the circumstances, at the very least with reference to temperature and atmospheric stress, that the drone would face on Everest.
“By the way,” Shaw stated, “I still don’t know what you guys are doing.”
“We want to fly a drone to the top of Mount Everest,” I instructed him.
“Really? Well, you’ve come to the right place.”
Shaw motioned for me to comply with him round to the again of the chamber. Here, on a concrete slab, sat a number of items of heavy equipment. There was a boiler used to pump steam, a refrigeration unit, and two large vacuum pumps related to the again of the chamber with rusty four-inch pipes.
As the pumps sucked air out of the chamber, a numeric show recording barometric stress started ticking downward. Renan and I peered by the porthole over Rudy’s shoulder as he labored the joystick on the controller like a teenager going for his excessive rating on Grand Theft Auto. The drone, hovering about 18 inches above the ground of the chamber, veered wildly from aspect to aspect and snapped towards its tethers like an offended junkyard canine. When the ticker hit 11.61 inHg—the equal of 24,000 toes above sea degree—the drone went into a loss of life wobble and flipped the other way up. The propellers hit the metallic ground and blew aside, spraying chunks of black plastic into the air like shrapnel. The Inspire 2 lay twitching on its again like a wounded animal.
“Shut down!” yelled Renan.
The check had taken solely three or 4 minutes, however in that temporary time Rudy had pushed the drone as exhausting as it could go. “As far as I could tell, it had plenty of thrust, which was the main thing I was worried about,” stated Rudy.
“Why did it crash?” I requested.
“I’m not totally sure,” he replied.
The excellent news was that the drone had made it to 24,000 toes earlier than it crashed. It was the best Rudy and Renan had ever flown. The dangerous information was that the drone had solely flown to 24,000 toes—4,000 toes beneath the peak of the key GPS coordinates the place we hoped to discover the long-lost stays of Sandy Irvine. And possibly, simply possibly, an vintage digital camera that would rewrite the historical past of the world’s tallest mountain.
From The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest by Mark Synnott with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Synnott.
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