Project Excelsior
Remembering the man that jumped from “The highest step in the world”
Air Force Col. Joseph Kittinger, the record-setting aeronautics pioneer, passed away on December 9, 2022, at the age of 94. Here’s a post I wrote a few years ago that looks at Kittinger’s record-setting jump and some of the technology that made it possible. Ad astra Col. Kittinger!
On August 16th, 1960, Joseph Kittinger jumped from a high-altitude balloon that reached an altitude of 102,800 feet, about 20 miles. He stepped out of his gondola and fell back towards the New Mexico desert, the starting point for this unusual journey. This third and final jump brought Project Excelsior to a close.
Project Excelsior was a series of high-altitude tests that simulated emergency escape from military aircraft. It took a certain kind of person to help conduct these tests. Thankfully, USAF Capt. Joseph Kittinger was up to the task. Kittinger recalled that when he was ready to jump he:
Stood up, took one final look out, and said a silent prayer: ‘Lord, take care of me now.’ Then I just jumped over the side. I had gone through simulations many times- more than 100. But this time I rolled over and looked up, and there was the balloon just roaring into space. I realized, however, that the balloon wasn’t roaring into space; I was going down at a fantastic rate. At about 90,000 feet, I reached approximately 614 miles per hour. The altimeter on my wrist was unwinding very rapidly, but there was no sense of speed. We determine speed visually when we see something go flashing by- but nothing flashes by at 20 miles up in the air; there are no signposts when you’re way above the clouds.
He fell for four and a half minutes and reached a maximum speed of 614 mph before deploying his drogue parachute. The entire jump, from stepping out of the balloon gondola to touching down in the New Mexico desert, took just under 14 minutes.
Kittinger also participated in Project Stargazer, where he and astronomer William White spent over 18 hours at altitude performing astronomical observations. Sign me up for this job.
The pressure suits that kept Kittinger alive were pioneered by Aviator Wiley Post. On a related and sad historical note, Post and actor Will Rogers died on August 15th, 1935, in a plane crash outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. Post needed a pressure suit to be able to fly his Lockheed Vega named Winnie Mae. Post flew in air races, and he correctly believed that flying at higher altitudes, in the area of 30,000 feet, would allow him to take advantage of “high winds” that were theorized to exist at those altitudes.
The Jet Stream is an area of fast air currents in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The Vega that he flew couldn’t be pressurized because its fuselage was made of wood, so Post set about making a pressure suit that would keep him alive during the flights.
Compare these early tests with the exploits of companies like Red Bull in the past few years. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the speed of sound in a free fall after he jumped from the Red Bull Stratos balloon and gondola. In 52 years, we went from governments testing high-altitude jumps for pilot safety to private energy drink companies sponsoring these jumps for publicity. That’s pretty remarkable if you ask me.
Read more about Project Excelsior here.
Picture Credit- National Museum of the US Air Force.
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Upcoming/Photos.aspx?igphoto=2000572287