American billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett today began his sixth attempt to orbit the globe alone in a balloon after taking off from a launch site in Western Australia. Fossett, 57, went aloft aboard Solo Spirit from a site at Northam, a small country town around 60 miles east of Perth at the start of a journey experts say will take 15 to 18 days.
Before his departure, Fossett said: "This is a very important adventure and a very difficult one. When I first started making attempts to fly around the world in a balloon I thought it would be just a matter of get the equipment, get it up in the air and somehow I'd make it."
Only a two-man team has ever flown a balloon around the world. Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard and English balloon instructor Brian Jones achieved the feat in 1999. The first stage of Fossett's journey would see him hurtling eastwards over Australia's central desert at speeds of up to 150 knots, or 210 kilometres per hour, driven by jetstream winds between six and eight kilometres above the earth.
