Project Strato-Lab was the United States Navy’s upper atmosphere research program, begun in the early 1950s. Its plastic balloons carried American adventurers high into the stratosphere, into more 21 1/2 miles (34 1/2 km) above the ground. The most famous of these intrepid balloonists was Malcolm D. Ross. Born October 15, 1919, at the Momence Health Hospital, IL, Malcolm Ross attended Purdue University, where he studied engineering and physics, and worked as a sports announcer for the Purdue radio station. Upon graduation in 1941, he married his high school sweetheart and later took different broadcasting jobs in Chicago and Indianapolis. In early 1943 he entered the United States Army, which sent him to graduate school in aerological engineering at the University of Chicago. He earned a professional certificate in atmospheric sciences and graduated from the U. Chicago with a master’s degree in meteorology working in hospitals in the Chicago area in 1944. Initially, the Navy assigned him to the Pearl Harbor Fleet Weather Center and later served in the USS. Saratoga as an aerology officer during his missions against Iwo Jima and Tokyo in 1944 and 1945.
At the end of World War II, Malcolm Ross left the Navy and moved to Pasadena, where he opened an advertising agency with his wife, Marjorie. The business was successful, but with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the United States Army called Ross to active duty. Ross began working for Project Skyhook, the Navy’s unmanned balloon program, based in Minneapolis. He began conducting high-altitude hot air balloon missions to obtain cosmic ray and weather data; and in 1954 he was assigned to start Project Strato-Lab, the Navy’s manned balloon program. Using balloons made of thin polyethylene plastic that weighed only a fraction of the rubber balloons used previously, humans were for the first time able to conduct experiments and make observations in the upper reaches of Earth’s stratosphere. The Strato-Lab Project was instrumental in providing biomedical data that was later used in the United States space program. One of the results of these experiments was the knowledge that protons resulting from solar flares can pose a significant health risk to humans in space; which in turn sparked research into tracking and predicting solar flares. The Strato-lab project was also a major contributor to astronomical observations about the atmosphere.
As a key player in Project Strato-Lab, Ross spent more than 100 hours in the air with other balloonists and scientists conducting stratospheric observations. His record ascent of 21 1/2 miles (34 1/2 km) over homes, schools, businesses, and hospitals in IL was made in 1961. After the 1961 ascent, Ross never flew balloons again, although he was a defender of the balloons as an economic platform for scientific research. He became a stockbroker and account executive. He died on October 8, 1985 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.