Breeze Keeps Earthwinds Frustratingly Earthbound : Aviation: Launch of Barron Hilton’s balloon is canceled, the latest glitch in 2-year-old attempt to complete journey around the world.

Earthwinds Hilton, the big-thinking balloon that couldn’t, didn’t on Friday--yet again.

The $4-million floating billboard bankrolled by hotel magnate Barron Hilton, dubbed “Earthwhens” by a Reno newspaper, has yet to complete its round-the-world journey over 70 countries in a quest for an aviation first. It has, however, successfully navigated the rocky road from awe to ridicule after four doomed liftoffs and nine cancellations.

“Yeah, it fails all the time,” said Angelia Fagundes, who has monitored most of the attempts to get the odd-shaped balloon craft aloft. There have been so many false starts since the first liftoff attempt in 1992 that the 19-year-old college sophomore sums up the public mood this way: “Earthwinds is going up.” Pause. “Never mind.”

It was not always that way. Before the craft’s first launch attempt, Mechanical Engineering magazine called Earthwinds “the most complex manned balloon ever built,” and its efforts to circumnavigate the globe “one of the few classic aviation feats yet unachieved.”

Since then, the hourglass-shaped craft has barely made it off the ground, and when it has, mishaps have followed. In January, 1993, the balloon was stumped by an inversion layer, couldn’t get over the Sierra Nevada and hit Mt. Peterson at the California-Nevada border. A year later, a frozen valve led to a landing in a Tranquillity, Calif., cotton field.

One time a tether broke when the balloon was being inflated, and another time high winds brought a protective dome down on the craft, damaging it.

On Friday, the problem was a gentle wind not strong enough to bother anything but the fragile Earthwinds craft. A mission spokesman said that as close to complete calm as possible is needed, so the liftoff was scrubbed about seven hours before the scheduled dawn launch from Reno Stead Airfield on the icy High Desert north of Reno.

The scene at mission control in the Reno Hilton hotel has taken on the look and feel of the headquarters of a losing political campaign. Favorable media coverage of the planned mission has turned more skeptical, and while sponsors at balloon headquarters are thrilled that attention still comes their way, skins have turned thin.

Sensitive staffers do a fast math that reduces the four actual attempts and nine cancellations to only two tries. “You can slice it a whole lot of different ways,” says Erin Porter, special projects director for Hilton Hotels, a major sponsor of the mission. “(Thursday) wasn’t a flight. It wasn’t a launch. It was a preparation for a launch.

“Whatever,” she pauses. “Semantics. . . .” her voice trails off.

“People focus on the frustrations, and there have been a lot of them,” she said. “But if it were easy, it would have been done by now.”

Barron Hilton, the hotel chain’s chairman and chief executive, held court this week in his 24th-floor suite, showing Earthwinds videos on a big-screen TV, including breathtaking footage of a launch and crash. He waved a smoldering cigar and chatted with actor friend Cliff Robertson.

“We’ve heard from those who said it can’t be done . . . from those who said it isn’t necessary,” says Barron Hilton’s narration. “There’s no tragedy without trying and failing. But there can be no progress in life if you fail to try.”

Ten miles away from this salon, the double balloon lies ready for inflating on a freezing tarmac. Looking more like an oversize Tic Tac than a flying home for three so-called aeronauts, its tiny pressurized gondola hangs from two cranes.

Hilton likes to call it “the ultimate room with a view--a view of the world,” and he brags that it was designed as a flying hotel room complete with direct-dial phone and in-room movies. The equipment-packed chamber is also close quarters, 24 feet long by 10 feet high and 10 feet wide.

Originally designed with a dash of science and a pinch of geopolitics, Earthwinds has since lowered its sights a bit. A NASA experiment measuring wind shear and a Russian test of the ozone layer will still be carried out if the balloon ever makes it to the jet stream, about 35,000 feet above the earth.

But Major Gen. Vladimir Dzhanibekov, chief of Russia’s cosmonaut training, will be staying home. He joined the original crew to help wheedle a flyover from the then-Soviet Union. Today, Hilton says, they need him in Russia.

A tent for champagne-quaffing VIPs stands ready for eventual early morning duty, if the Earthwinds ever gets that close to a hoped-for dawn launch. A launch today is still a question mark.

A very chilly volunteer, shivering in the weak morning sun, approaches Earthwinds with equal parts realism and hope.

“It was warmer here at 2 in the morning than it was at 4 in the afternoon,” the volunteer said. “But, you know, when it fills up it’s awesome. It’s like the Kitty Hawk. They laughed at (the Wright brothers) for years. As the 747s go over our houses, they’re not laughing any more.”