With the exposure to vacuum, his right hand began to swell. At 40,000 feet, Kittinger’s pressure suit inflated, but his right pressure glove did not inflate. (Photo courtesy of United States Air Force)Īs the 200-foot-tall silvery balloon rose and floated higher, it expanded to 25 stories in width. On 2nd June 1957, Kittinger soared to 97,000 feet and is considered the first astronaut who reached near space in the oldest aerial vehicle-the balloon. The team sealed his helmet and helped him climb into the gondola perched on the launch truck. With his gear, Kittinger weighed 320 pounds. He wore layers of warm clothing, gloves, and socks under his pressure suit, and his team kept him cool enough to make sure that he did not sweat-as any perspiration would turn into ice and freeze his clothes in the stratosphere. Kittinger started breathing pure oxygen for two hours to remove all the nitrogen from the blood to avoid getting bends (decompression sickness) which occur with rapid changes in air pressure. to start filling the helium balloon, which at sea level was about four stories (40 feet) wide and 20 stories high. The launch of Excelsior III was to take place in the New Mexico desert at 6 a.m. In 1960 these were some of the known perils of the stratosphere, and there were many unknowns, but that did not prevent Kittinger from taking the risk. So, except for the weightlessness in space, you are in a deadly space environment. And though the temperature is 100 degrees below zero, the sun’s glare can burn you. And when you rise to 100,000 feet, you are above 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. At 63,000 feet, the air pressure is so little that your blood can boil, and blood vessels and organs can rupture. For human beings, though, the “death zone” begins at 26,000 feet because the insufficient oxygen cannot sustain life for more than few minutes, which means health hazards beyond that altitude only get worse. However, the atmosphere does not abruptly end but thins out with increasing altitude. The designated boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space is 100 kilometers (330,000 feet) above the Earth, called the Karman line. (Photo courtesy of United States Air Force) Kittinger weighing 320 pounds with his gear, gets ready to fly where no one had flown before. Kittinger II–File photo as a captain in the US Air Force (Photo courtesy of United States Air Force) On August 16, 1960, thirty-two-year-old Capt. This experiment, third in a series, was part of Project Excelsior. The objective was to test a multistage parachute system, from 100,000 feet above, that would provide a means of escape for pilots forced to eject at high altitudes. And then, with only his pressure suit and helmet for protection from the deadly space environment, he was going to jump to Earth. Kittinger, a test and fighter pilot, was going to take off, not in a rocket but in a fragile balloon, which would carry him up, in a boxlike gondola suspended beneath it. On 16th August 1960, Captain Joseph Kittinger got ready to rise to an altitude of more than 100,000 feet above the Earth -about three times the flying altitude of commercial planes. It was one of the most dangerous aerospace experiments, by the United States Air Force.
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