Steve Fossett

Steve Fossett made a fortune trading options and securities before turning, in his late forties, to a string of long-distance record attempts that had little in common except the extremity of endurance they demanded. He set records in sailing, gliding, and swimming the English Channel, but the goal he pursued longest, and failed at most publicly, was flying solo nonstop around the world in a balloon.

Five separate attempts between 1996 and 2001 ended in failure, from equipment problems to a violent thunderstorm that dropped his capsule 6,000 feet over the Coral Sea and left him swimming for his life after the balloon crashed into the water. Rather than treat the failures as reasons to stop, Fossett used each one to refine the next attempt's equipment and weather planning, working with meteorologists to find safer trans-oceanic routes.

In 2002, on his sixth attempt, he completed the flight in the Spirit of Freedom, becoming the first person to fly solo nonstop around the globe by balloon, spending nearly two weeks alone in a small pressurised capsule with almost no sleep and constant technical vigilance. He followed this in 2005 by piloting the GlobalFlyer, an ultra-light fixed-wing aircraft, on the first solo nonstop circumnavigation by aeroplane without refuelling.

He continued attempting new records into his sixties. In September 2007 he took off alone in a small single-engine plane over the Nevada desert to scout locations for a future land-speed record attempt and never returned; wreckage and remains were found in the mountains more than a year later, the cause never conclusively established.