I've come to Cape Town in South Africa
to do something that I've always wanted to do, but
I never thought I'd get the chance.
I'm about to fly incredibly high
to the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere.
From here, I'm hoping to see something that only a handful of people
have ever seen.
The Thin Blue Line, the fragile
strip of gas that surrounds our whole planet.
And this is what's going to.
Take me there.
This is an English Electric Lightning,
the most beautiful fighter aircraft ever built.
This is when
when England built the best aircraft
in the world.
The lightning is no longer in service.
So this piece of magnificently
overpowered engineering is going to take the 18
Kilometers is straight up.
Actually, I read somewhere that the when you read
about the altitude of the lightning, it says altitude estimated 60,000 feet.
Ceiling classified.
So I don't know how these can go.
I've heard rumors they can go to 80,000 feet,
which is amazing.
My journey will take me beyond
almost all the molecules of gases that make up our atmosphere.
If you think you are going to get sick,
Yeah.
use a bag, okay? Right.
Hopefully not.
To get there,
I'm going to experience what made the Lightning famous.
Vertical takeoff.
It takes just seconds to reach nine kilometers up,
but I'm still in the thickest layer of the atmosphere called the Troposphere.
But the further I climb, the thinner
the atmosphere becomes
Up at 68,000 feet,
90% of the atmosphere is below me.
The only people above me are on the space station.
So beautiful.
I'm now at 60,000 feet, 18 kilometers up,
and the highest I can go.
Above me.,
the sky is a deep, dark blue...
and that is what I've come to see.
Our atmosphere.
That really is the Thin Blue Line
that protects us.
So fragile, so tenuous.
Just a tiny sliver of blue.
Amazing.