Flying to 90,000ft, in a glider… This is not a crazy aspiration by the ambition of Einar Enevoldson, 74 years old and who holds the current altitude record reaching 50,761 feet in a sailplane. This is already impressive to reach this altitude without power. A commercial airliner will usually fly at 35,000ft. Now Enevoldson is going for 90,000ft. Keep in mind the record for a sustained horizontal flight in a piloted aircraft is 73,736ft. That was done in the Lockheed U2 in 1989. Other aircrafts have broke the 100,000 ft as they were propelled by boosters, but they have flown in parabolas as their mass quickly brought them back down.

So, how do you get a glider to 90,000ft ? Enevoldson reckons he has found a way to soar higher than anyone had thought possible in a winged craft, by hitching a ride on awesome stratospheric waves powered by the polar vortex. His goal is to fly without fuel or an engine to 90,000 feet, where the Earth’s curvature glows against the blackness of space. Up there, the air pressure is less than 1 per cent of the pressure at sea level. That’s equivalent to the surface of Mars, and too thin to support the mass of almost any crewed plane. So the Perlan team is building a winged craft unlike any before - a cross between a glider and a space capsule that will be light and fast enough to fly at this extreme altitude. After years of planning, setbacks and tragedy, Enevoldson’s Perlan Project is poised to push back the limits of aeronautical exploration.

With no heavy engine or fuel, a glider’s wings could in principle support it in the stratosphere. The problem is getting up there. For their highest rides, glider pilots search for “mountain waves”, which form when a weather front spills over a mountain, creating upward draughts on the lee side. They are signposted by lenticular, or UFO-shaped, clouds formed by the rippling air. But there’s a limit to how high these draughts go. Just below the stratosphere, winds tend to change direction or stop altogether, killing any mountain wave. So pilots long assumed that the tropopause - between 33,000 and 49,000 feet (10 and 15 kilometres) - was as high as you could go in a glider. But Enevoldson actually thinks you can go higher and will try to do so in 2013.