Fantastic Plastic The Magic Molecules

FINAL SCRIPT

NARR

We humans are a clever lot… we’ve done some extraordinary things with very ordinary things.

But now we can create substances that never existed in nature, and suddenly the possibilities are endless.

The new super-materials are taking us to places few of us could imagine … to the most extreme corners of the planet, even into space.

We call them plastics, or polymers, and some day the survival of our entire species could depend on these fantastic plastics. FANTASTIC PLASTIC: The Magic Molecules We make our newest plastics from some of the oldest things on the planet.

Ancient plant and animal life was buried, squeezed and cooked into rich black oil.

Fossil fuels keep our modern societies moving … and their by-products are just as useful.

They’re the basic ingredients of plastics.1

These magic molecules from the past are shaping our present … and our future.

The Australian outback is one of the last great frontiers… and it’s the scene of a race that’s pushing the frontiers of plastics ... a 3000 kilometre 2 dash across the continent in plastic cars … so light they can be driven by the sun..

They use no more energy than a hairdryer,3 but they can hit speeds of close to 160 kilometres an hour4. The World Solar Challenge is a testing ground for super-plastics that auto makers could use in all our cars someday.

A team of New Zealand school kids are driving what looks like a grasshopper on Graduation Day...but the high tech competition doesn’t faze them. Sync: “What do you think is going to be your biggest problem on the trip. Probably the heat, it’s gotta be the heat.” The real heat is going to come from the teams with the lightest and strongest plastics. And that comes down to just a few super-cars. The current champ is Aurora, from Australia. This polymer powerhouse weighs only 205 kg5.

David Fewchuk spent nearly 30 years with Ford, but for the past few years he’s been driving the Aurora project. He knows it’s going to be a tough race...and so do his team. Sync: “I think there is probably six teams that have a good chance of winning and we are one of those six”. This is the third time Tony Vriens has competed in the World Solar Challenge Sync: “I think the team that has the least mechanical problems will probably be the team that wins”. Australia’s main rival is the high-tech Dutch entry, Nuna. The race is a first for Ramon Martinez and his team...6

… but the the Dutch are confident their plastic car can snatch the title from the Aussies.

Sync: “We have a good car just need a little bit of luck, no broken parts that kind of stuff then we’ll be alright”. The Nuna team includes a Dutch astronaut7, Wubbo Ockels. He hopes his space-agency sponsors can make the Dutch car really fly. They’ve supplied Nuna with the latest solar cells... and an astronomical price-tag8.

Sync: “I have heard a few different figures which are all huge numbers and congratulations to ‘em for being able to get that kind of sponsorship”. Aurora may not have the blue-chip backing of the Dutch, but it does have a high-tech weapon of its own … Sync: “Well I think by volume this car is about 70% plastic and we’ve got beyond most others in making the chassis out of plastic our back wheels are plastic and so on it goes so you could call it a plastic fantastic”. We have a long history of looking for super-tough materials … and it’s usually the military who lead the charge. Before the age of plastics, “ strong” meant “heavy.” A mediaeval knight had to carry half his own weight in steel9

But today, steel armour wouldn’t help you much… it would have to be so thick, you wouldn’t be able to move. So when you’re in the firing line, you need something tougher yet lighter. Kevlar body armour is built from a polymer fibre, and it’s 5 times stronger than steel10.

Nine millimetre rounds travel at 270 metres a second11 … but inside the bullet proof vest, multiple layers of kevlar stop them dead. Amazingly, this magic plastic body armour is based on the same chemistry that gives us silk scarves and spider webs12.

Kevlar is a polymer13...and polymers are the molecular basis of all plastics14.

Polymers can be made soft and bendy, or hard and rigid. Which is why they’re so incredibly useful - we can design them to be whatever we want. Yet the way they’re built is surprisingly simple... it’s building blocks for grownups. You take a bunch of small molecules, and assemble them into a long chain to form a “magic” molecule … a polymer15.

The chemical process that makes them join together is called … polymerization16. All it needs is a kick start to get it going. The trigger is called a catalyst, and it starts a game of pass-the- parcel… each molecule links up with its neighbour to borrow an electron. Eventually they form a long chain… and you’ve created a polymer17.

But we didn’t invent polymers. You can find them in every branch of nature... the cellulose in wood is a polymer18.

So are frankincense and myrrh...two of the gifts in the Nativity story. They come from trees found in parts of Asia and Africa19,20.

Demand for another natural polymer...ivory... sparked a big breakthrough in the history of plastics. Elephants were being hunted ruthlessly in the late 18 hundreds to feed a craze for billiards21.

An inventor called John Hyatt made some balls from celluloid, one of the very first commercial polymers22. They worked just fine … provided you didn’t scare too easily…. Hyatt’s invention was closely related to gun cotton … a powerful explosive23.

Celluloid helped launch a whole new industry...the movies24 ... though it took a while to beat the problem of flammability25. Back then, a “hot movie” was something else … Dialogue on archive tape: “Development of scores of materials for special uses has prompted the spread of moulded applications into many diverse and new fields”. As the chemists ironed out the bugs, new plastics began to reach into every corner of our lives. Especially the street corner where our love affair with the automobile was in full swing. Cars and plastics sparked the rise of new industries. Just about anything could be made quickly and cheaply from plastics. But plastics production isn’t pretty … it uses some nasty chemicals, and the scale is gigantic. Petrochemical factories eat up about 245 million tonnes of oil and gas every year26

…. And it’s not going to last forever. Sync: “We see how many plastics and synthetic materials are used all made from petroleum products you know whether its your carpet your upholstery your draperies your clothing or your packaging materials all made of synthetic petroleum products what are we going to do for the raw materials for those”. Dr Pat Gruber’s solution is dazzlingly simple ... Vegetation gave us oil in the first place. So why not cut out the middleman and make our polymers directly from plants? After all, it’s the same stuff … just a few million years younger. Outside Minneapolis they’re already extracting polymers from the sugars in corn and spinning them into fibres. The jury is still out on whether it costs more to make things this way, but when the oil runs out, green polymers could be the way of the future. It’s a remarkable thought that … within the next hundred years, plastics could become a grow-your-own industry, powered entirely by sunlight. END OF PART 1 FOR NAT GEO

Part 2 – NAT GEO In Australia, plastics powered by sunlight are about to take on a whole continent. “Bart, good luck with the race, have fun, be safe, we’ll see you in Adelaide I guess” The plastic super-cars in the World Solar Challenge will travel more than 3000 kilometres The fastest will take only 4 days, the slowest more than twice that ...and a third of them won’t make it at all27.

The school kids get off to a slow start. The machines with the poshest polymers are already streaking ahead. Slender as the wing of a sailplane, the Aussie car, Aurora, slices through the air three times more easily than a conventional car28,29.

The Dutch car, Nuna, is more powerful30 but the shape is less efficient31. With so little to choose between the two super-cars, this race could go either way …

END OF PART 1 FOR INTERNATIONAL VERSION

PART2 – INTERNATIONAL VERSION

By noon on day two, the leading plastic cars in the World Solar Challenge have covered nearly a thousand kilometres… almost one third of the marathon journey through the searing heart of Australia.

There’s been a head-to-head battle for the lead, but at the Tennant Creek control stop, the Aussie car is in front32.

They’ve been helped by a patriotic crosswind that clipped a few crucial k’s off the bulkier Dutch car. But after four hours sweltering inside his plastic shell, and with the Dutch right on his tail, Tony Vriens is feeling a bit like a polymer himself … baked and under pressure! It’s going to be a fast race – they’re already edging close to the previous speed record for the Challenge.

Sync: “Oh, we over took them about 10 minutes ago – they had slowed down to around about 80 I think, 85. We were averaging about 95 so yeah it was a pretty good feeling”. Ramon uses a photo opportunity to give a progress report to the folks back in the Netherlands.

At nearly 40 celcius it’s not just the drivers who’re feeling the heat … but their plastic cars are raring to go.

Aurora’s lead is less than two minutes ... and ahead is some of the toughest terrain in the world… hot desert, merciless sun. But so far everything’s worked flawlessly. At the back of the field things are not going quite so well for the high school team. Their low-tech steel chassis is slowing them badly. The youngsters are already more than a 160 kilometres behind the leaders. At speeds nearing 120 kph the plastic super-cars are taking a different kind of beating … but special combinations of plastics help them stand up to the worst punishment.

The strongest plastics are composites33, a mixture of different materials that give each other strength. The most common is fibreglass34...layers of fine glass mesh sealed in a polymer resin. Composites turn up in some unexpected places.

Concrete road bridges are constantly under attack from vibration and bad weather. In time, they wear out … and that’s a multi-billion dollar problem35. Dean Foster is convinced plastics are the answer. This bridgetook only a few hours to build… and it’s rust-proof and weather-proof.36

Sync: “The advantages of composites is that they are very strong upwards of 10 times stronger than steel or concrete they’re very light weight and they don’t corrode so you know the advantages of utilising composites over conventional materials are tremendous. It’s pretty neat to be on a cutting edge type of technology although for uses in civil engineering Although it’s been around since the end of World War 2 and the use of aerospace and composite materials has been to the moon and back.” It’s uses for civil engineering bridge structures has just recently come on, more applications such as this behind us are out there, proven and we have a lot of success stories and a practicing bridge engineer will have confidence in the material and will be able to specify that and work with it in designing.” But it’s a tough sell, because the stakes are enormous. When engineers have bad dreams, it’s a fair bet the Tacoma Narrows disaster features in there somewhere.

The bridge was a mover and shaker the locals called “Galloping Gertie”. But on November 7, 1940, Gertie became a bucking bronco. Battered by strong winds, the bridge shook itself to pieces37.

The message for engineers is that every material has its limits. But plastics may soon be able to fix even that. They’ll simply repair themselves. “This is going to be at 15 micrometres per second” “Right, are you ready” “I’m ready”

Sync: “The way we’re doing that is we’re using micro encapsulated healing agent and imbedding that as well as a second stage catalyst into the bulk plastic. So what happens is when a crack propagates rather then the piece simply breaking apart and needing to be replaced what happens is that crack grows throws through many of these small micro capsules and their content flows out into the crack plane and comes in contact with the catalyst and starts to polymerise across that crack plane and in effect bonding the two sides of the crack back together again.” Get the number of healing capsules just right, and the repair can be almost perfect. Sync: “Probably one of the first places you will see this is in the electronics industry where you’re not looking at carrying large loads what you’re looking at is normally your cell phone breaks because you dropped it enough times that a chip has started to separate or a lead has started to separate and this material would do a very good job at preventing that failure.” Heavy-duty self-healing plastics are still in the future ... but super-tough, lightweight polymers deliver a killer combination of strength and speed.

Those qualities are about to change the way wars are fought on the ground too. Plastic armour will make tanks so light, they can be carried by air. The British Army already has one – the Tupperware Tank. Sync: “You’ve got to get the weight down because actually what the soldier wants at the end of the day is the smallest lightest possible thing that will do the business. You’ve got the ability to have smaller power packs to give you increased mobility you can put more armour on if you want to but if you can take it off so much the better and it means that you can then get the theatre of operations and goodness knows we are now considering going into theatres that we wouldn’t have even dreamt of perhaps even 6 months ago.

Incredibly, plastic armour can be safer than steel too.

What the plastic will do is it will absorb energy and the big problem for the crew inside the tank are bits of steel flying around as a result of penetration and if you can penetration absorb those pieces in the in the rear part of the material then you go an awfully long way towards protecting the crew”. “Preventing penetration and protecting the crew” are two of the biggest problems facing the designers of the international space station … and like the military back on earth, they’ll rely on plastic composites to do the job. Exposed to cosmic rays, extreme heat and cold ...and a hail of debris from space… the giant space lab will be wearing a kevlar security blanket38.

In case something goes badly wrong, there’s also a life boat for the crew. The X-38 escape vehicle is designed to handle the toughest job on – or off –the planet... an emergency evacuation from space39.

Fibres sealed in resins give the X-38 its strength, and special heat-resisting tiles will protect it during the return to Earth40. Each X-38 will have to survive for three years in space – and always be ready for action within three minutes41. In an emergency, plastics will play a role in every stage of the descent. This blazing ride through the atmosphere is a simulation… but the rest of the trip has already been fully tested. Eight kilometres above the ground, the plastic craft is still doing one thousand kilometres an hour. A giant nylon drogue hauls this back to a manageable 100 ... but that’s still too fast for a safe landing in a craft with no engine, no wings and no wheels42.

Next a giant nylon parafoil opens in stages ...it’s the biggest in the world...one and a half times the wing area of a jumbo jet43. The X-38 is joined to it by hundreds of kevlar lines44.

At 60 metres above the ground the rescue vehicle is falling at only eight kilometres per hour, and gliding forward at 60... slow enough for a pinpoint landing45.

So now those incredibly tough plastic composites will make even a rescue from space possible. In the central Australian desert, it’s the Aussie solar car Aurora needs rescuing right now. The headwind has dropped, and the Dutch… on the left … make their move on the leader.

It’s not exactly Formula One ...there’s only a couple of k’s an hour difference between the cars...so when Nuna finally edges past Aurora, nobody gets to eat any dust ….

The plastic cars are doing 110 as they head into a mining town 800 kilometres from the finish. It’s so hot here that most of the locals … plus the odd unwary visitor … have moved underground46. It’s one of the most desolate places on earth… not a spot you’d normally choose to camp for the night.

But it’s late, so the solar cars are running low on power… and Aurora’s still in second place.

Sync: “We were in first place for about half the day and they just caught us now and they’re nine kilometres up the road” The Dutch drop by to wind up the Aussies. “...and it’s very windy tomorrow so watch out”. “The wind’s from the rear you know…” “Oh that’s right, you guys, you’re just speeding. “We’re a bit more aerodynamic and you have more power, you know” “But we knew exactly when the roads changed, and the winds went down and we had planned to use all that energy to speed up in that section”. But the Aussies aren’t finished yet…

Sync: “The car’s going very well, so we’ll see what tomorrow brings however, I need to catch those dutch”. The Aussies may be feeling slightly tragic, , but the schoolkids are devastated. Hundreds of kilometres behind the leaders, an electrical fault has forced them out of the race.

Sync: “I am disapoointed we didn’t get further but I am certainly very pleased we got to Australia. It is better than any other team from a New Zealand school has ever done before”. The car will have to hitch a ride down to Adelaide now… not exactly how the team had planned to drive through Australia.

The schoolkids pitted their plastics against one of the harshest environments in the world … and lost. Five thousand kilometres away, across the desert and beyond the frigid southern waters, a group of American scientists are fighting a similar battle … but on a much larger scale.

McMurdo Station is a US base near the South Pole. Mid-summer here may not look like much, but there’s 24 hours of daylight… And if you’re a scientist, that means you can try some unique experiments. An Antarctic storm has been raging for weeks, though, and it’s putting a multi-million-dollar project at risk. The scientists need to launch an enormous plastic balloon… and soon. Otherwise their experiment will be put on ice for a whole year. It’s a race against time … and things are not looking good.

END OF PART 2- ALL VERSIONS

Part 3- ALL VERSIONS

McMurdo Station in Antarctica is like no other town on earth. People come here to do their experiments on the ice, then they head straight home. The major project right now is code-named TIGER47 … the trans-iron galactic element recorder…. And it’s all based on plastics. TIGER’s mission is to measure cosmic rays up at the edge of space, where astronauts do most of their work. We need to know exactly what they’re dealing with up there48. TIGER’s payload is packed with plastic ray detectors that can count the number of hits, and tell us what the particles are, and how powerful they are49. Sync: “When an atom goes through it – it gives off a small amount of blue light and the kind of light you get depends on the atomic number and the energy of the particle”. The 2000 kg payload will be carried aloft by a gigantic balloon, a flimsy plastic envelope that’s as tall as a 25-storey building50,51 … and wider than a football field52.

Sync” On the ground actually only a small part of the balloon it will look mostly unfilled and there will be a small bubble on the very top but then that gas will expand by a factor of 200 and by the time it gets up to 120,000 feet and at that point it will be a very large balloon, more than 100 metres in diameter. If we can get up and the float wind co-operates we are going to go for two complete circumnavigations around the pole”. This is where the buck stops. Mark Cobble is the launch director … He’s got his balloon… but there’ll be no party unless the weather clears soon. He might have to put the launch on hold for a whole year… a scientific disaster.

Sync “Yeah I’m still getting stuff ready out here I just kinda want to know what my timeline was as far as.. Mark’s feeling pressure from the science team, who are anxious to get started. Sync: “We are nervous we are sitting around. We would like to fly soon because if we fly soon we have a better chance of making two revolutions around the continent”. The longer the balloon stays aloft, the more radiation its plastic sensors can measure. But these icy winds would tear it apart in seconds. That’s a problem Nature solved millions of years ago … how to make a light material that can handle the toughest conditions.

Spider silk is so fine it’s almost invisible...yet it’s one of the strongest substances on the planet53. At Grenoble, in France, researchers are using the synchrotron - a space-age machine - to study a great mystery from the past: How do spiders make their silk? The synchrotron generates a beam of radiation that’s so fine it can pick out individual molecules under a special microscope54.

But spiders are cantankerous critters55, so they usually need a bit of … gentle persuasion … before they’ll agree to take part in this particular experiment.

Sync:” So the first thing what I have to do is look that they have something to eat the spiders so you go to the local fisheries shop and you buy some small animals and they are feeding then and are happy then so the spiders are sitting then in small cages and having a small water hole and feeding on small animals. You have to have a set up which allows you to immobilise the spider during the spinning process so it’s actually a small copper block onto which you strap the spider with mylar straps. And you take one of the spider silk fibres out and pull it out to a small motor where you wind up this silk”. It may seem like overkill to use a machine the size of a city block to probe the rear end of a spider, but the synchrotron’s slender beam has finally shown us how the spiders’ silk-making protein works.

Sync: “So scientists has first understand what is going on...that is the part of the analytical part and then comes the synthetical part and we would like to make it and make it even better.”

Sync: “The ecological properties are quite interesting because the spider makes the silk at ambient temperature, ambient pressures it recycles it, it eats the web afterwards. It’s incredibly economic to make, whereas nylon or kevlar are very expensive materials to make, also ecologically expensive because you use very nasty chemicals, you use high temperatures, high pressure. Silk is a protein, the spider eats the fly and out comes a material better than anything we know”.

Once scientists knew what the silk-making protein looked like, they could look for the gene that tells spiders how to produce it. Now they’re trying to improve on nature by inserting the spider gene into something far less grumpy… specially bred goats56.

Transgenic goats don’t catch flies, but they do produce spider silk protein in their milk. So now there’s a new product we can make from goats’ milk … a fibre called Biosteel that brings us a step closer to the incredible strength of spider silk.. It’s claimed that a strand of spider silk only as thick as your thumb could support a fully-loaded jumbo jet… and that a web made of the same stuff could catch a jet fighter in flight!57 As we step out further into space, ultra-strong materials like Biosteel will become even more important...and we’ll most likely be wearing them. The astronaut’s suit is built from some of the most advanced plastics, so it’s flexible, but super-tough58.

When you work in space you need every bit of that protection, because we’ve treated space pretty much like the Earth … we’ve filled it with garbage59.

Here at ground level we pour a torrent of trash into the landfills around our cities. Plastics are some of the main offenders … millions of soft-drink bottles, countless tonnes of packaging. And they could lie buried there for centuries.

But plastics might actually solve the problem of our orbiting garbage dump.

The next generation of satellites could pack a 10km plastic line called a terminator tether60.

When the craft reached the end of its life, it would be ordered to wind out the plastic line. The tether would be dragged through the earth’s magnetic field. This would slow the satellite, its orbit would decay, and the craft would burn up in the atmosphere and disintegrate61 … leaving no debris in space.

Plastics may soon help us to reduce another type of space pollution… Rockets are big, expensive, dangerous… and they poison the atmosphere62.

So researchers at Space Dev in San Diego are trying the opposite approach. They’re thinking cheap, safe, small… and clean.

Sync: “I spent about 30 years in the computer field and I started a computer software company in 1984 and sold it for a fortune in 1995 and the lesson I learned from that is, that the big old, heavy main-frame way of thinking is susceptible to being replaced by the light, agile, less expensive mico-computer way of thinking. So SpaceDev is bringing the micro-way of thinking to space which is bogged down in the old main-frame way of thinking.” Space Dev have designed a plastic rocket they claim won’t poison the planet. Incredibly, it’s fuelled by plexiglass … and laughing gas.

FW: If we push the button the valve will open, the igniter will ignite and the plastic will start burning with the nitrous oxide flowing through at very high pressure creatign a flame out on the side. The system is armed…all clear….3,2,1

The main benefit of the fuel that we’re using is that it’s inexpensive to the point of not even mattering, it’s non-explosive,it’s non-toxic, it’s environmentally safe, the burning of nitros oxide and hydrocarbon is essentially carbon dioxide and water, it’s non explosive so it’s safe for even human use. LW: …321.

Sync: “The main benefit of the fuel that we are using is that it is inexpensive to the point of not even being…mattering, it is non-explosive, it’s non-toxic, it’s environmentally safe, the burning of nitrous oxide and hydrocarbon is essentially carbon dioxide and water. It’s non-explosive so it is safe for even human use.” Another plastic aid for space travel would burn … absolutely nothing. Sync: “Right now we’re trying to work on ways to move objects and people around in space using essentially strings. Much like David used a slingshot to kill Goliath the idea we’re working on is to use very long string or cable to pick up a payload from one orbit and toss it to a higher orbit and essentially the idea is we have a long cable attached to one spacecraft that’s rotating as that spacecraft moves through its orbit so that tether can swing down and pick up a payload from a low orbit and then flip it around and toss it up to a higher orbit.” If we’re serious about exploring deep space, we’ll have to find some way to get there without carrying huge amounts of fuel. We’d still need to get into Earth orbit, but then a chain of plastic tethers parked in space could in theory sling the ship into higher and higher orbits … without burning a drop of fuel63.

One of the thinnest plastics on the planet64 might be just the thing to take on the toughest job of all … getting us to the stars. Sync: “The distance to the nearest stars is about 4 light years. That means you need something like a change in your velocity, of a 10th of the speed of light in order to get to the nearest star in 50 years. Well a 10th of the speed of light is about 30,000 metres per second change in velocity. There is something called the rocket equation and if you just plug in a rocket equation and calculate the propellant to accelerate lets say a 200 kg space craft, from zero to 30,000 metres per second you will find that the propellant is, I don’t know how many millions of tons but it’s a lot. The idea of getting to the nearest star with a solar sail is to either have space placed lasers or light concentrators located near the sun which can continuously push on the sail over a short distance to accelerate that space craft up to a 10th of the speed of light. It will then fly off to the nearest star in about 50 years.” This technology could even save our species … we might be able to take a free sailboat ride to another solar system when our own sun starts to die. The sun is already dying over the Australian desert, but nobody’s going anywhere right now. The Aussies are feeling the strain after three anxious days on the road. The Dutch car is pushing them to the limit, and Australia’s plastic fantastic could be in trouble. At daybreak the Dutch can already smell victory. But really, the race between the plastic cars is still too close to call. The Dutch car Nuna’s only 16km ahead of Aurora, and there’s 800 to go before they reach the finish line… The Aussies might still get past the Flying Dutchman and hold on to that championship.

End of part 3 – INTERNATIONAL VERSION

Part 4 –INTERNATIONAL VERSION

Port Augusta is the final pit stop for the cars in the World Solar Challenge. It’s not exactly a metropolis, so this is major event for the locals.

The magic molecules have performed superbly … but the support crews can’t relax yet. It’s important that nothing goes wrong on the last leg of the marathon race across Australia The Aussies have tried everything they know, but the Dutch have held on to their lead. Sync: “We have done quite well, we are about 15 minutes ahead of Aurora and we’ll try and kept that distance.” Sync: “It depends on the wind very definitely, yeah if we need there to be a head wind, that hurts them and it helps us. So if there’s a wind we’ll probably catch them and there’s not they’ll get a bit further away”. For the next few hours Bart, the Dutch driver, will have to keep his cool in that plastic bubble under a blistering sun. He’ll be trying to squeeze every last bit of energy out of his space-age solar panels to get Nuna up to its top speed.

Tony, the Australian driver, has an even tougher job. He’s forced to ogle the locals during an agonising 15 minute handicap while Nuna races ahead.

Nuna, the Dutch car, is more powerful than the Aussie car it's’ also heavier. But with the helpful breeze pushing from behind, that's not a problem.

The lightness of Aurora and it’s superior shape are no help in these conditions.

The cars are streaking along at 120, but with 300 kilometres of desert road ahead, things could still go horribly wrong.

END OF PART 3 – NAT GEO VERSION

Part 4 – NAT GEO VERSION

At McMurdo Station in Antarctica, things have started to go right at last. The weather is clearing, after weeks of fierce storms. The balloon launch director has put his team on standby. Sync: “Hopefully this is the day, starting off pretty good. Mother nature will just hold out for 5 or 6, 7 more hours, somewhere there” Mark can call the whole thing off right up to the last minute … but this could be the last chance he’ll get this year to launch his massive plastic balloon. Millions of dollars are at stake. He has to get it right.

It’s safe to unroll the fragile balloon … provided it stays in its protective wrapping.

Everything depends on the wind now … and with a rig that stands over 250 metres tall65, Mark will have to cope with several different winds at different altitudes … all at the same time. Keeping up to speed with the constant shifts and changes is a nerve-wracking business for the Met team.

Sync: “Right now the surface is picked up a little bit which is what I expected it should die off around 5 o’clock this afternoon local time. The upper air there is a level about 1150 feet that’s still a little strong its running in the double digits round 15 to 17 knots so we’re waiting for that to go away we’re taking a look at that and hopefully everything will fall into place”. Everything’s fallen into place for Nuna, the Dutch solar car. The polymer galloper has scored a stunning victory in the World Solar Challenge … . By the end of the race the Dutch have stretched their lead to almost half an hour66. The Nuna team has shown that the right mix of plastic composites can cope with almost any conditions … and those state-of-the-art solar cells probably helped too…. Aurora’s managed only second place this time. Even so, the Down Under-dogs have clipped more than seven hours off their previous record67.

That has to be worth a drink…. Sync: “It was neck and neck all the way down basically and we’d pass them and they’d pass us. In the end they had way too much power for us to compete against but you know we really gave them a good hard run for their money and we’re are pretty proud of the result we’ve got”. Next time the plastic cars will be even lighter and faster, the race even tougher. Ramon will need all his Dutch courage to hold on to that title. Down at the Pole, Mark Cobble could use a little Dutch courage himself about now.

Everything’s ready for the launch of his giant balloon. They’re all waiting for him to give the word. But Mark is still not happy with the winds ... and the hours are slipping by. He’s under pressure, but he must keep his cool.

SYNC: These are all becoming north-westerly now you know…we did have some souths in there, now it’s…you know everything is…we’re going this way and we’re going this way and it’s going this way They’ve been on the ice for nearly 16 hours. Everyone is cold, tired … and sunburnt. The winds are still shifting around, but this is as good as it’s going to get. Mark must decide.

There’s no going back now. The plastic skin of the balloon is so fragile that once it’s unwrapped it has to be launched … otherwise it becomes just a gigantic strip of waste plastic..

MARK SYNC “It’s been a long day we started at 8 o’clock this morning and I guess it’s now near midnight or so, but the forecasts shows that the winds were going to be dying down as the day went on. Unfortunately as the winds do die down in speed they become more variable and that’s the problem that we had to contend with this evening.

And finally, after a nail-biting day on the ice, the moment of truth. But the excitement’s not over yet. The crane crew has to dash forward with the payload to stop the balloon twisting and breaking. Right up to the last second the launch could end in disaster. There’s nothing quite as unpredictable as a 25-storey bag of wind….

SYNC: “Oh that’s great man….” “woo hoo we did it….” “It’s a regular hay-ride” “Hallelujah” It’s the mother of all plastic bags, an 800 thousand cubic metre68 monster that will drift along the top of the atmosphere for more than a month. But polymer science never stands still, and researchers are already building ultra long duration balloons that will stay up there for months … giant spheres that weigh almost nothing, but can cope with almost anything. Truly fantastic plastics.

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