Joe Kittinger’s Great Leap: Image courtesy of USAF
“Lord, take care of me now,” Joe silently prayed. USAF Captain and test pilot Joseph Kittinger had just ridden a gigantic helium balloon from the Earth’s surface to nearly 20 miles above the New Mexico desert floor. Then he jumped — out of his cramped gondola, literally into thin air.
Kittinger’s Historic Leap
“Try anything” Joe made his jump on August 16, 1960 — nearly eight months before Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering space-flight — making Kittinger the first human in space.
Before jumping, Joe’s balloon had risen to a staggering 102,800 feet altitude, some three times higher than commercial jets fly. The temperature at that height was 110 degrees below zero F, the air 99% vacuum, the pressure so low that his 35-foot-wide balloon expanded to 200 feet in width. His thin pressure suit passed its first test in space – preventing him from freezing to death due to intense cold, and keeping his blood from boiling due to the extremely low pressure of space.
“It’s so black overhead,” Joe later recalled. “I was struck by the beauty of it. But I was also struck by how hostile it is.” (Our atmosphere scatters sunlight, giving it its blue appearance. With 99% of the air gone, the sky was a black deeper than coal. And Kittinger couldn’t see the stars, because his pupils had contracted from the sun’s glare.)
Cold Warrior
In 1960, the cold war was raging. A few months before Joe’s jump, the Soviets had shot down a high-flying U-2 aircraft over Central Russia. Wily Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev let the world believe the pilot hadn’t survived. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower announced his cover story: it was a weather plane which had drifted off course. Then, Khrushchev produced the pilot; USAF Captain Francis Gary Powers, as well as the remains of the plane’s reconnaissance camera. The embarrassed Eisenhower had to fess up — it was a spy plane.
Kittinger next to the Excelsior gondola: Image courtesy of USAF
When Powers was later asked how high he was flying, he quipped, “not high enough.” Such aircraft could reportedly fly at altitudes up to 70,000 feet, but the U.S. needed to fly its spy planes even higher to prevent being shot down by Soviet missiles. What if the pilot had to eject in an emergency? How would he survive the severe cold and near-vacuum at the edge of space?
So 150-pound Joe Kittinger volunteered for the ultra-high altitude balloon experiment called Project Excelsior. Within a few seconds after jumping, Joe reached a staggering free-fall speed of 714 miles per hour, exceeding the speed of sound (at this altitude). He was in free-fall for over four and a half minutes.
Then, some 14,000 feet above the desert, Kittinger felt his first parachute open. The never-before-tested chute had worked. “Thank, you, God, thank you,” he said into his voice recorder. He landed safely on the desert floor.
Click to Read Page Two: Einstein’s Equivalence Principle at Work
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