A man stepped out of a balloon higher than any airliner flies, and one small equipment failure nearly cost him everything.
Above the New Mexico Desert
The sky changes from blue to a darker color at high altitudes above the New Mexico desert. At a distance of nineteen and a half miles from the Earth, the atmosphere contains very little air and the sky appears black. The helium balloon was large and constructed from thin material, and it supported an open gondola that consisted of a small platform with rails - this vessel carried Joseph Kittinger, who was a captain in the U.S. Air Force and was thirty two years old.
On August 16, 1960, Project Excelsior III was intended to move human flight into regions that pilots had not explored before.
He wore a thick suit that used internal pressure to prevent his blood from turning into gas in the thin atmosphere. As he watched the curve of the Earth, a mechanical problem occurred inside his right sleeve. The seal that maintains pressure in his right glove stopped functioning during the climb. Because of the very low external pressure, his hand increased in size quickly, and he felt intense physical pain because the fluids under his skin grew larger. Kittinger understood that telling the ground crew about the broken equipment would result in the end of the flight. By choosing to remain silent, he continued the mission because he had waited for many months for the weather to be calm and clear.
The Step Into the Void
At 102 800 feet Kittinger stood on the small metal step of the gondola near a sign that displayed "This is the highest step in the world". There was no sound above his position and the land of the continent was visible below him. He spoke a short prayer into the radio microphone, which was "Lord, take care of me now". Then he moved off the platform into the empty space and began his descent.
The fall began without sound and caused Kittinger to feel confused. In the low density atmosphere, air did not move against him to indicate his rate of movement but his speed increased rapidly. By the sixteenth second of his descent, a small parachute with a six foot diameter opened because the equipment design required it to stop him from rotating horizontally. Such a rotation is dangerous because it forces blood to move into the head.
As he moved through air that reached temperatures of ninety four degrees below zero Fahrenheit, layers of ice formed on his visor. His right hand became twice as large as its usual dimensions and became impossible to move within the rigid glove - but Kittinger reached a speed of 614 miles per hour, which is approximately nine tenths of the speed of sound, while the force of the Earth moved him downward.
For four minutes and thirty six seconds, he moved through the higher parts of the atmosphere during the longest period of stable descent in the records of flight. As the air became more compact, the friction of the gas served as a physical tool to slow his movement. At an altitude of 18 000 feet, the primary parachute opened without obstruction and allowed him to manage his direction. Roughly thirteen minutes and forty five seconds after he stepped from the platform of the gondola, the feet of Kittinger reached the ground of the White Sands Missile Range near Holloman Air Force Base.
The military medical officers moved quickly so that they could examine the enlarged hand of the pilot. In multiple hours, the blood flowed sufficiently to return the limb to a typical volume. Within a few days, the cells repaired themselves and did not sustain lasting harm, though some purple skin discoloration remained for a short time. The outcome served as a minor consequence for the advancement of scientific knowledge.
A Lasting Legacy
The information collected during the Excelsior III flight transformed the safety protocols for high altitude aviation. By acting with bravery, the pilot showed aerospace organizations and mechanical engineers that a pilot can survive a high altitude emergency exit or a brief encounter with the environment near the edge of space - those findings influenced how designers created the ejection seats and pressurized garments for the first NASA astronauts.
His specific achievements for the highest jump with a parachute and the highest velocity of a pilot through the air remained unsurpassed for fifty two years. As the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner surpassed those records in 2012, the pilot used an even tone to direct him from the command center as the Capsule Communicator. To explain his motivation for leaping into the dangerous vacuum despite a malfunctioning suit, the pilot cited his obligations, his desire for knowledge and his firm decision to ignore past risks.