The historic first successful woman skydive from the stratosphere will have to wait another year.
Hera Rising, a venture of the nonprofit Rising United, will select three experienced skydivers last year and send them into the stratosphere in a hot air balloon, from where they will then return to Earth. EarthHowever, due to the costly and complex nature of the project, they will wait a year until 2026 instead of 2025.
“We are still in the process of fundraising for this project, and while we have momentum, we have not yet raised the full amount needed,” a spokesperson told Space.com in an email (the spokesperson added that he was not immediately available for an interview).
“Given that jumps need to take place in the spring or fall for safety and weather reasons, plus development and training time, 2026 is likely,” the email added. “We are positive and encouraged by the response from potential investors and look forward to making further announcements in the near future.”
Because new aerospace projects often use new technologies that require significant capital to develop, they often get bogged down in funding and technical issues, and then development moves forward at a somewhat uncertain pace as engineers learn and test as they go.
Even NASA has recently faced problems developing new programs, with the first two crewed missions of the Artemis program, which was expected to put humans on the moon, now scheduled to launch in 2025, a year later than planned.
Long-term space programs can also run into scheduling problems. NASA is reconsidering its International Space Station (ISS) schedule this month after Boeing’s Starliner faced significant delays in landing its first crewed mission. Veteran SpaceX is also investigating a rare malfunction of its Falcon 9 rocket during a satellite launch last week in an attempt to restore launches of astronauts and cargo to the ISS.
RelatedHera Rising to become first woman to skydive in the stratosphere in 2025 (Exclusive)
Rising United had sought to raise $750,000 on Kickstarter last year — the results of that fundraiser are currently private because users must log in to view the page — but organizers said the money was needed to cover mission and spacesuit designs, English and Spanish curriculum for students in grades 5 to 8, and marketing materials. He told Space.com in 2023.
“We work with all kinds of schools… we especially target schools that have large, diverse populations,” curriculum designer Diana Lockwood Bordaña, a woman, Latina, Ed.D., and author of A Steam Mindset (2022, independently published), told Space.com in 2023.
The three skydivers selected are Eliana Rodriguez (Colombian descent), Diana Barrerin Jimenez (Costa Rican descent) and Swati Varshney (Indian descent). After the skydivers are selected from the three, the remaining two will remain with the mission for public relations purposes and ground support during the mission.
The high-altitude suits for the mission will be manufactured by Paragon Space Development, the company behind the hardware used by Alan Eustace for his record-breaking 25-mile (41-kilometer) jump from the stratosphere in 2014.
