Prelude to Space

No man has lived in space, and only one man has spent more than a moment on the border of space. That man is wiry, redheaded Air Force Captain Joe W. Kittinger, 28, whose balloon of bubble-thin plastic last week rose to a record-breaking 96,000 ft. (TIME, June 10). His flight was planned by Lieut. Colonel John Paul Stapp, head of the Air Force's Aero Medical Laboratory, as an approach to the bristling problem of staying alive in space.

Later flights will be made by scientists skilled in scientific observation, but for the experimental and risky first flight, Space Surgeon Stapp (TIME, Sept. 12, 1955) wanted a young man with quick, trained reflexes and elastic endurance to cope with emergencies. "I didn't want much," says Stapp. "Just the sharpest pilot I ever met." Kittinger, the man selected, already knew his way in the air. He was an F-100 pilot with 3,600 jet hours, but Stapp had him take special training for ten months. He qualified as a balloon pilot, also got a paratrooper's rating by making ten parachute jumps. He learned to fly helicopters (often an unnerving experience for an airplane pilot) and took ten claustrophobia tests (24 hours each, sealed in a capsule). He worked with the experts of Winzen Research, Inc. of Minneapolis, makers of the balloon that he would "fly. For several weeks before the flight he was in rigid physical training.

High-Voiced Helium. At 11 p.m., seven hours before the scheduled start of the flight, Kittinger got into his pressure suit ("feels like being loved by an octopus") and climbed into the gondola, a closed cylinder 3 ft. in diameter and 7 ft. tall. The lid was clamped shut, and the air inside was replaced by a helium-oxygen mixture. This was to denitrogenize Kittinger so that a sudden drop in pressure would not give him the bends by releasing bubbles of nitrogen in his blood. From this point on, his voice sounded somewhat squeaky; helium raises the pitch of the voice by about one octave.

Everything about the gondola had been carefully designed to cushion the harsh conditions on the edge of space. The upper atmosphere is bitter cold, but the air is so thin that it has little chilling effect. The controlling influence is sunlight, much stronger than on the surface. To ward it away, the gondola was insulated with four layers of honeycomb paper and plastic, and an air-conditioning system was capable of keeping the inside temperature down to a comfortable 55DEG F.

For more than five hours Kittinger sat on his nylon mesh seat chatting with Stapp and the scientists by radio, while they watched the readings of instruments that monitored his pulse, breathing and heartbeat. As everything was checked and rechecked for the start of the flight, Kittinger kept reporting, "No sweat. No sweat." Stapp says: "His heartbeats were more regular than the beats of those who monitored them."

While Kittinger was being denitrogenized, the balloon was lying flat and limp on South St. Paul's Fleming Field. An Air Force crew turned helium into it, and bit by bit a bubble of plastic reared upward. At last the balloon, as tall as a 25-story building, was standing upright in the still early-morning air. At 6:27 a.m., it took off. Kittinger, his heartbeat still steady, radioed "Goodbye, cruel world."

The balloon rose almost vertically, swelling toward its full 2,000,000 cu. ft. as the pressure diminished. Kittinger kept reading over the radio an endless succession of instruments, stealing a glance once in a while through one of the six portholes. The sky was turning a darker blue, and Minnesota below him was fading to a featureless grey.

Familiar Shape. Part way up, the radio voice transmitter failed. Kittinger could hear the voices of Stapp and the scientists, but he had to send his reports in slow code. This took nearly all of his time, so he had little time left for sightseeing. The sky grew very dark blue, but he saw no stars or planets. A great shape below looked vaguely familiar. Suddenly he realized that he was seeing the whole of Lake Michigan, 307 miles long.

The balloon reached 96,000 ft. in 78 minutes. "There I was," cracks Pilot Kittinger, "at 96,000, stalled out but not dropping." The original plan had been for him to make a twelve-hour flight, but an oxygen leak developed, and Colonel Stapp, who was following by helicopter, decided that Kittinger should start down after 2 1/2 hours. Otto Winzen, maker of the balloon, relayed the decision. Kittinger replied in code that he would not come down. Winzen pleaded. Back from 18 miles overhead came the coded answer: "Come and get me." Stapp and Winzen were afraid that hypoxia (lack of oxygen) had unsettled their pilot, but soon they recognized Kittinger's normal style of humor.

To start down, Kittinger released a calculated quantity of helium. Slowly the great balloon sank toward the earth. Kittinger could not see the surface that he might hit, so airplane pilots circling below him talked him down, telling him when to drop a little ballast to keep in the air until he had cleared all dangerous obstacles. At last the gondola settled into the shallow water of Indian Creek 80 miles from its take-off place. Colonel Stapp jumped out of his helicopter and unlatched the gondola's cover. Kittinger stepped out grinning. "Not a red hair of his head," said Stapp, "had turned grey."

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