A Man Driven to Extremes : Adventures: Mountain climbing? Ocean crossings? The Iditarod? Kid stuff. For a real rush, millionaire Steve Fossett plans to fly-- nonstop--around the world in a hot-air balloon . . . alone.

When Steve Fossett was 5 or 6 years old--it must have been about 1950--he climbed into the family’s Plymouth, all by himself, and took the car for a spin.

“He got half a block just by stepping on the starter,” said his mother, Charalee Fossett of Garden Grove.

That story might make it easier to understand what millionaire-adventurer Fossett plans to do next.

Sometime in the next week or two, when the weather looks right, the 51-year-old Fossett will climb into a small yellow gondola and attempt to make the first nonstop balloon flight around the world. Fossett thinks his 15-story-tall helium balloon can do it in 16 to 20 days, floating at altitudes of 18,000 to 24,000 feet.

Fossett will fly alone in the “Solo Challenger,” but his mother claims she isn’t worried. “He can take care of himself,” she said. So far, she has been right--though her son has tested that theory to the limit.

In 1985, Steve Fossett swam the English Channel. Since then he has finished 47th in Alaska’s Iditarod dog-sled race, run Colorado’s Leadville 100 ultramarathon in less than 30 hours and set six ocean sailing records. Fossett also sailed solo across the Atlantic, drove a Porsche in the 24 hours of Le Mans and climbed Argentina’s 23,000-foot Cerro Aconcagua.

Still, these adventures seem sane compared to the balloon trip.

Fossett got his balloon license just three years ago, with the express purpose of flying around the world. Two years ago, he and balloonist Tim Cole flew across the Atlantic in Solo Challenger. In February, in the same gondola, Fossett made the first solo flight across the Pacific, setting a distance record of 5,483 miles.

All this from a guy who looks like a mild-mannered stockbroker.

Fossett, however, is no stockbroker. That would be too safe. His Chicago-based company, Lakota Trading Inc., is a “market maker,” buying and selling options on securities. Market making is a hazardous business, but Fossett said he doesn’t mind risking “a big punishment” to win a big reward.

The rewards have been big enough that he can spare $300,000 to fly a balloon around the world. That sounds like a lot, yet Fossett and crew are the underdogs in a three-way race.

“We have competition,” said project manager Timothy “Bo” Kemper--competition armed with much larger balloons and budgets Fossett estimates at $5 million apiece.

Virgin Records mogul Richard Branson of Great Britain and Dutch balloonist Henk Brink each plan launches this winter. Branson said recently that he would be ready to fly in January.

Kemper, a 32-year-old vice president of Loyola University of Chicago, claims Branson and Brink have corporate and possibly even government support.

“Steve is 100% self-financed,” Kemper said. Solo Challenger’s low budget is almost a point of pride with the crew. For example, Branson and Brink--the wimps--will have expensive pressurized cabins; Fossett’s bare-bones Kevlar gondola is not pressurized. He will wear an oxygen mask. The competition will fly in crews of three; Fossett will fly alone.

He will launch his balloon from a small valley called the Stratobowl in South Dakota’s Black Hills, midway between Rapid City and Mt. Rushmore. The valley is actually a bowl-shaped depression, 400 feet deep. There is a clear, flat meadow at the bottom. The bowl’s cliffs and steep, pine-covered slopes offer 360-degree protection from the wind--a handy feature when your balloon is 150 feet tall.

The Stratobowl may be the best natural launch site in the world. It got its name in 1935, after two Army Air Corps pilots launched a 20-story helium balloon from the meadow. Some 40,000 people braved near-zero temperatures to watch the predawn lift-off. Capt. Orville Anderson and Capt. Albert Stevens climbed to an altitude of 72,390 feet to become the first humans to reach the stratosphere. When they landed safely, 230 miles east, they were national heroes. Fossett has a copy of the National Geographic that chronicled their mission.

*

Earlier this month--60 years after the stratosphere flight--Fossett supervised the unpacking of Solo Challenger at the bottom of the Stratobowl.

It was a sunny afternoon, but the temperature was just 4 degrees. Fossett’s crew struggled with a reluctant propane space heater, trying to chase the bitter chill out of the drafty storage shed that will house Solo Challenger until the flight.

A public television cameraman recorded the process, while a technician from National Geographic searched in vain for a place to mount an external camera on the gondola. The magazine wants pictures of this flight too.

Fossett seemed not to notice the cold, probably because he wore most of the clothes he’ll wear during the trip. Air-insulated Mickey Mouse-style boots kept his feet warm. He wore polypropylene long underwear, a synthetic fleece jumpsuit and the same gray flight jacket he wore over the Pacific. During this flight he’ll add another fleece-lined jacket and a polypropylene balaclava, topped by a fleece-lined ski hat reminiscent of Elmer Fudd.

Fossett might not look exactly dashing, but he won’t look any sillier than Anderson and Stevens did in 1935. They wore leather football helmets borrowed from Rapid City High School.

The Stratobowl is private land. The Tomovick family owned it in 1935, and Pat and George Tomovick still do. They leased the launch meadow to Fossett and threw in the shed, which normally houses their ’49 Ford. It’s a humble home for a record-breaking gondola, but what Fossett lacks in luxuries he makes up for in the expertise of his support crew.

For example, there’s Andy Elson of Great Britain, one of the world’s foremost experts on high-altitude ballooning, who hopes he can keep Fossett from freezing. The temperature will be 40 degrees below zero up there, but the gondola’s heater failed miserably on the Pacific flight.

“It’s actually very hard to get them to work at high altitude,” Fossett said. Elson redesigned the heater, then flight tested it successfully six times. “We think we’ve got it,” Fossett said, as Elson tinkered in the shed behind him.

Just in case, Fossett will take a spare. He will have plenty of heating fuel on board because he will fly an unusual type of balloon--a Rosier (pronounced Rose-e-AY). The Rosier’s inner helium envelope is encased by an outer hot-air envelope. Eleven tanks filled with 69% propane and 31% ethane will fuel the burners. The outer hot-air envelope provides some lift, but its main purpose is to heat the helium. By controlling the temperature of the hot-air envelope, Fossett can ascend and descend almost at will, without using ballast.

“These balloons will fly forever,” said Bruce Comstock, another key player on Fossett’s team. Comstock, 52, of Ann Arbor, Mich., is tall enough to have played pro basketball but he looks and talks more like a kid who took math and physics courses “to get the easy A’s”--which he did. He also is a world champion hot-air balloonist and six-time national champion. He claims not to remember how many world records he has set.

Comstock’s main contribution is the semi-secret Vegematic II balloon autopilot, which gets its name from a cruder version Comstock designed for Fossett’s Atlantic flight. Comstock built the original so fast there was no time to design a box. Fossett simply crammed it into a clear-plastic Rubbermaid Salad Keeper.

*

Fossett won’t just drift aimlessly around the globe. He and meteorologist Lou Billones have worked out a detailed itinerary, beginning in western South Dakota.

“We hook up very well with the upper air flow here,” Fossett said. Like the stratosphere pilots, he’ll launch before dawn, when surface winds are calm. Fossett will climb to 18,000 feet until he hits a layer of air called the “zonal flow.” Drifting southeast, Fossett will climb 1,000 feet a day as he burns fuel and consumes supplies. He’ll level off at 22,000 to 24,000 feet. He can climb as high as 30,000 feet to avoid weather, but thunderstorms can reach 40,000 feet, which is why long-range balloonists fly in winter.

Fossett plans to reach the Atlantic somewhere along the Virginia coast. From there he’ll fly northeast to the southern tip of England, then southeast again to Ukraine, where politics will be his biggest worry. American balloonists were shot down over the former Soviet Union earlier this year. Kemper is getting flight clearances and trying to let everyone know Fossett is coming.

From Ukraine, Fossett will fly straight east, across Russia and China, to the Sea of Japan. Then he’ll re-create his Pacific flight, heading northeast to a landfall over Washington state.

Ultimately, “I could land anywhere from Nebraska to southern Canada,” he said.

*

The trip will be physically challenging. Fossett’s cabin is not quite as big as the average dumpster. He describes the two short, hard benches inside as “very comfortable,” but they look like short, hard benches. He’ll cook freeze-dried military “meals, ready to eat,” in chemical heating pouches and boil water for tea on an electric burner. “It’s like camping out,” Fossett said cheerily.

How will he pass the time?

“I’ll have a reasonable amount of work to do each day,” he said. He’ll navigate with a global positioning system, conduct scientific experiments for Loyola University and communicate with friends via fax. Students, reporters and the curious can follow his progress on an Internet home page.

If the heater works it will be a toasty 50 degrees in the cabin, but Fossett will spend a lot of time outside, sitting on top of the gondola, watching the world go by. Yes, it will be 40 below, but the wind-chill will be negligible. Balloons travel with the wind. Fossett will study cloud formations and topography by day and enjoy city lights by night. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

*

Still, one wonders. Even Fossett himself can’t readily explain what drives him to extremes, except to say, “It stems from a more general ambition to succeed.”

In some ways, he is an unlikely adventurer. Kemper compares Fossett to Lindbergh, but Teddy Roosevelt, another overachieving adventure junkie, might be a more appropriate comparison.

Like Roosevelt, Fossett was plagued by childhood asthma, which kept him off sports teams. Fossett’s career started in the slow-but-safe track. After graduating from Garden Grove High in 1962 and Stanford in 1966 with a degree in economics, he worked as a systems engineer for IBM. Then came the market.

Today, at 5 feet, 11 inches tall and 200 pounds, Fossett is fit but not superfit.

Maybe it’s genetics. Charalee Fossett, 82, and Dick Fossett, 84, a retired supervisor for Procter & Gamble, still live in the same Garden Grove house they bought in 1944. But as a young couple, they hiked throughout the Swiss Alps. In 1987, they hiked the Milford Track in New Zealand.

Steve Fossett said he learned mountain climbing in a “really good Boy Scout troop.” He hiked California’s Muir Trail alone the summer of 1962. During college, he swam the Hellespont (Dardanelles) in Greece and climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland.

Not all of Fossett’s adventures succeeded. His first two attempts at the English Channel failed. Lung problems drove him off Mt. Everest after he had climbed to just above 23,000 feet. And Charalee Fossett will never forget the time 11-year-old Steve got stuck in the barbecue chimney.

“He tried to go down it, like Santa Claus.”

Fossett downplays the risks of Solo Challenger. “The capsule is seaworthy,” he said. But he is realistic about flying 24,830 nonstop miles. “It’s very difficult to do this,” he admitted. “The chances of success are less than even.”

No matter. If his competitors beat him, he’ll wait a year and make the first solo flight. He and his wife, Peggy, have no children, so his adventure schedule is flexible.

But don’t bet against Fossett. Comstock won’t, although he was skeptical when a neophyte from Chicago asked him to design the Vegematic.

“I was polite,” Comstock said. “But I told him there wasn’t enough time.”

Of course, there was enough time. Today, Comstock is a believer. “I’m here because he’s here,” Comstock said as he tinkered with a Capsat satellite navigation antenna in the bitter cold of the Stratobowl. Fossett’s upcoming expedition is not a mystery to Comstock.

“It’s not the kind of thing you say to people, but we do it because we get to play with fun, expensive ballooning toys.”

A minute or two later, Comstock put a bottom line on it. “We’re a strange group.”