Days after Bert Padelt completed a history-making 2,852-mile balloon journey from Maine to Europe across the Atlantic Ocean, the whole experience still felt like a blur. 

The closet-sized basket where he and his co-pilots endured torrential rain, snow and freezing temperatures was packed up, its voluminous canopy deflated, but the world record-holding American balloon builder couldn’t believe he had finally accomplished a lifelong dream. 

“I kept waking up thinking, did this really happen?” Padelt said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News from Luxembourg, where the Atlantic Explorer landed on June 7. “It’s now starting to sink in, and it has turned out better than I ever thought it would.”

Padelt — who is from Pennsylvania — alongside fellow American Peter Cuneo and British explorer Alicia Hempleman-Adams, are now the first people to cross an ocean in a hydrogen-powered open-basket balloon, and just the 20th team ever to mount a successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight. 

The trio spent more than 70 hours in the air after taking off from a Presque Isle field early June 4, traveling as fast as 90 miles an hour and as high as 25,000 feet as they navigated strong winds and a storm above the open ocean. They set down near the city of Diekirch in northeastern Luxembourg on a “very peaceful” morning, a stark contrast to the conditions they had faced earlier.

“It was almost like we were on another flight altogether,” Padelt said. “You could hear birds chirping, roosters crowing, cows mooing. You saw fog in the valleys, which was indicating calm winds. Our final hour in the air was an extremely peaceful, wonderful moment.”

The Atlantic Explorer set off from Presque Isle after hours of delays from high winds. The delay prevented the team from getting ahead of bad weather that would catch up to them later, Padelt speculated. 

The first day went well, he said. All their equipment functioned perfectly and the balloon flew well. The team crossed New Brunswick, then Prince Edward Island over the first 12 hours, surpassing where the Atlantic Explorer had been forced down in its previous two attempts due to bad weather and a gas leak. 

By that evening, they cleared Cape Breton Island and headed for Newfoundland, the last landmass before the open ocean. A few hours later, Padelt, Cuneo and Hempleman-Adams committed to the crossing and ventured out over the Atlantic.

Atmospheric conditions on the second day meant the team had to drop more ballast — jettisoning sand bags from the basket to gain altitude — than they wanted to. 

“We basically knocked off two days of duration [of] ballast,” Padelt said. “But the saving grace is we knew that the speed was going to pick up, so we weren’t all that concerned.”

Then came the storm. 

“It was a surprise,” Padelt said. “We knew the weather was there with the hopes that it was going to be south of us.”

With little more than a thin rain cover, the Atlantic Explorer battled heavy precipitation through the night. It rose into the clouds, where temperatures dropped as low as 17 degrees below zero and snow built up on top of the balloon, forcing it to sink. The snow turned to rain and then the process repeated itself. 

“This continued probably for about four hours or so,” Padelt said. “But when the sun came up, it was a bright blue sky above us and [the storm] was beyond us.”

The pilots had projected a successful flight would take four to six days averaging around 35 miles per hour. But as the wind picked up and the sun beat down on the balloon the morning after the storm, the Explorer topped 90 miles per hour. The balloon crossed the open Atlantic Ocean in approximately 37 hours.  

They passed over the beaches of Normandy along the French coast on the evening of June 6, the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion, when the Allied forces used hydrogen powered barrage balloons to prevent German aircraft from attacking their position from a low altitude.

They flew inland overnight, crossing into Luxembourg as the sun rose on June 7, and landed in a field. 

Besides being the first hydrogen-powered trans-Atlantic trip, the journey set a world distance record for the size and type of balloon. Hempleman-Adams, once the youngest person ever to visit the North Pole, also became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a gas-powered balloon, and the second to do so in any type of balloon.  

The balloon’s chase team reached the site within an hour. That group included Padelt’s wife, Joanie, with whom he built the Atlantic Explorer. 

“All the times I’ve been thinking about this flight and how I wanted it to end, I wanted it to end with a stand-up landing with my wife there to see the balloon,” Padelt said. “The odds of that are very slim when you think about how far you’re flying … but as it turned out, it worked. And so when she arrived, there were some strong emotions, for sure.”

Members of the Cercle Luxembourgeois de l’Aérostation, a nearby balloon club, also arrived to help the crew deflate and pack up the balloon. 

As their successful crossing drew attention, the royal family of Luxembourg invited the group to the Palais Grand-Ducal — the country’s royal palace. Padelt, Cuneo and the chase team met with the Grand Duke Henri, whom they presented with one of their final two bags of ballast from the flight. 

“He was very, very interested in the flight and how it turned out,” Padelt said. “He was asking quite a few questions and so forth and went to great efforts to welcome us to Luxembourg.”

The crew headed back to the U.S. on Thursday, capping off an adventure Padelt had dreamt of since he was awed by the first trans-Atlantic balloon flight. That balloon, the Double Eagle II, launched from Presque Isle in 1978. 

As the Atlantic Explorer took off from the same city last week, hidden in the canopy was a 1978 silver dollar, both a good luck charm and an homage to the Double Eagle II, as a new group of balloonists made history. 

“I knew it would be hard. So there were no surprises,” Padelt said. “But the sense of reward afterwards is exactly the feeling I was looking for.”

More than $200 million was spent in Maine’s U.S. Senate race in 2020, a historic figure that raised eyebrows and became a case study for advocates of campaign finance reform.

Six years later, as Democrats bank on progressive Graham Platner and Republicans look to defend five-term U.S. Sen. Susan Collins to keep hold of the Senate, that record is about to be obliterated in political advertising alone.

Overall ad spending in Maine this election cycle could reach almost $500 million, according to the latest projection from AdImpact. The amount is driven by a whopping new estimate of $384 million in the Collins-Platner race alone, making the contest the fourth-most expensive Senate race in the country behind Texas, Michigan and Georgia. The races for the 2nd Congressional District and governor could also see heavy spending.

The new estimate nearly doubles what AdImpact previously expected in Maine’s Senate race. It comes after contentious primary season spending and after Platner weathered a string of controversies in the fall and recent weeks to secure the Democratic nomination.

More than $150 million in ads through Election Day have already been booked in the race, about $100 million of it by Collins-aligned groups. But Democrats — who outspent Republicans in former Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon’s losing bid in 2020 — are sure to catch up as they push to take back Congress from President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

“From record-setting races and surging party committee war chests to a competitive landscape that continues to expand, all indicators point to 2026 being the most expensive political advertising cycle in history,” AdImpact said in its report.

Nationwide, AdImpact expects $11.6 billion in ad spending this year, up from the 2023-2024 cycle’s record $11.2 billion. Political spending has exploded nationwide since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.

Ads are also increasingly costly in Maine. A candidate’s 30-second spot in Portland cost an average of almost $250 in 2020, compared with $314 this year. But the rate for a 30-second ad from an issue group has nearly doubled, at almost $945 compared to $490 in 2020, according to AdImpact. Stations must give candidates priority and their lowest rates.

Month-by-month averages have fluctuated this year, but issue groups that have dominated the airwaves have seen costs rise each of the last three months, with the current average for 30 seconds of airtime almost $1,600.

Running on a message of overhauling the power structure in Washington, Platner has proven a solid fundraiser who effectively booted Gov. Janet Mills from the Senate race. Collins and her allies have offered ads touting the senator’s track record of bringing home federal investment and others targeting Platner’s background, from a Nazi-linked tattoo he’s since covered to offensive social media comments and alleged toxic behavior in past relationships.

Platner outraised Collins between January of last year and May, about $16 million to more than $12 million. Platner has almost $350,000 in ads booked from the day after he won the primary through Election Day. Platner’s bid has received a boost of almost $11 million combined in ads going after Collins from the nonprofit dark money groups Majority Forward, Unrig Our Economy and Duty and Honor.

The Collins campaign hasn’t booked nearly as many ads yet between this week and Election Day. But she has significant help from dark money political action committees such as One Nation and Pine Tree Results PAC, which have already been running ads and have booked more than $46 million million combined so far.

Pine Tree Results has seen at least $1 million in donations from the Lexington Fund-connected Republican legal activist Leonard Leo, and $2.5 million from Florida hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. Nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses have donated almost $10 million collectively to Collins’ network since the beginning of last year, The Maine Monitor reported.

The Winning for Women Action Fund, a super PAC boosting Republican women, has booked $16 million in pro-Collins ads. Her campaign has also received more than $538,000 from at least 315 individual donors bundled through AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group.

Collins’ campaign and allies make the case that Platner will likely pick up just as much if not more super PAC and dark money donations, including from billionaires. They also say while some wealthy donors give based on ideology, many are more focused on stable government, leading them to embrace the longtime lawmaker and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Platner has rallied progressives around the argument that the money flowing into politics leads to votes that too often help donors, not working Mainers. His campaign on Friday pointed to his endorsement in May by the anti-corruption group End Citizens United, which accuses Collins of never meeting “a corporate PAC check she didn’t like.”

“We’re building a movement to get money out of politics and build a government that represents working people, not billionaires,” Platner said at the time.

American Promise, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit pressing for a constitutional amendment to empower states and Congress to regulate campaign fundraising and spending, has made progress, according to spokesperson Jenny Parker. Idaho in April became the 25th state to formally urge Congress to move on the issue.

“Fifty years of Supreme Court rulings mean voters don’t have a say over the rules,” she said. “Our solution is seeing very strong momentum, and it is across parties.”

Another person injured in the lumber mill fire and explosion in Searsmont, Maine, last month has died, officials said Sunday.

Wayne Woodbury, 76, died Sunday morning at Maine Medical Center, the Office of State Fire Marshal announced. He’d been part of the response to a May 15 fire at Robbins Lumber that led to a silo explosion. Another firefighter died, and a dozen people were hospitalized.

Woodbury was the town’s assistant fire chief. Chief James Ames was injured and later released.

“The Office of State Fire Marshal extends its sincere condolences to his family, friends, and the members of the Searsmont Fire Department during this difficult time,” the fire marshal’s office said in a statement.

Investigators have determined that the fire was accidental, but the investigation is ongoing.

Maine State Fire Marshal

Maine State Fire Marshal

The fire and explosion caused a massive blaze that brought in firefighters from around the region. The firefighter who previously died was identified as 27-year-old Andrew Cross, of the Morrill Fire Department.

Mass General Hospital in Boston is treating two other patients from the mill. They were both listed as critical as of Saturday afternoon.