By : Rohan Sullivan

An Australian-US team is readying for its shot at the first nonstop around-the-world balloon flight, with lift-off planned for just days after Chicago millionaire Steve Fossett's team splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

Denver real estate magnate Dave Liniger's team is making final preparations in the Australian outback town of Alice Springs. The team expects to succeed where others failed by taking the high road, flying on the outer edge of the atmosphere where weather shouldn't be an issue.

Weather conditions, however, can affect take-off and landing, and dictate a launch between late December and mid-January. Tuesday morning local time, Monday in the US, is the first scheduled launch (28th Dec 1998).

The team is making its first attempt at what balloon enthusiasts describe as the last great adventure in aviation.

Fossett, British millionaire Richard Branson and Per Lindstrand of Sweden abandoned their more conventional balloon flight on Friday about 15 km off Kahuku point at the northeast tip of Oahu, Hawaii. They have tried a total of 11 times.

Fossett's team ditched about midway through its journey after losing the high-altitude 320 kph winds needed to carry the combination helium and hot-air balloon across the pacific to North America. They got caught in a low-pressure system and feared they would be stuck for a week.

"In the stratosphere, there is no significant weather features, so once we get up there we don't get the storms that have brought down previous attempts," said Dan Pedersen, a former US Navy test pilot and the Liniger team's mission Control Director.

"At this time of year, the winds are exactly east to west and at 40,000 metres they can go clear around the globe," he said on Thursday by telephone from control headquarters in Alice Springs.

Though spared the weather concerns, flying in subspace poses its own dangers. The biggest threat is a sudden leak in the gondola - a 2 metre by 2.5 metre pressurised, temperature-controlled capsule.

"Our equipment has to be like a mini-spacecraft," said Australian John Wallington. He, journalist Bob Martin of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Liniger, who is Chairman of Remax International Inc, will pilot the balloon.

The team will fly in a polyethylene balloon thin as lunch wrap that is 140 metres in diameter at "full float" and 700 210 metres high, large enough to envelope the Houston astrodome.

They will wear pressure suites made by Russian space engineers and rise 1,000 300 metres a minute during take-off to reach a cruising altitude of 40,000 metres, or about 24 39 km, above sea level.

There, they expect to catch winds that will carry them West at up to 80 mph along a route that almost directly follows the Tropic of Capricorn.

Sixteen to 18 days and 37,000 km later, they hope to return to earth somewhere in the Australian outback, hopefully near Alice Springs.

The NASA-developed balloon type has been used before, but only to carry unmanned scientific payloads to heights of about 24,000 metres.

They will have about 2.5 per cent of the atmosphere we have on the ground," Pedersen said. "Go much higher than that and guess where you are you're out of it (the atmosphere)."

"Where these guys are going there is no second change," he said, "The life-support systems have to work."