Unreleased Tracks: Project Excelsior

I had the good fortune to write a bunch of pieces for The Daily's "History Page" -- an elegant little corner of that rather eclectic paper, which presented 1000-word vignettes of American history. On three occasions, pieces I wrote didn't run. I'm posting them here for the baying masses who watch this site constantly for updates.

In light of Felix Baumgartner's extraordinary jump, I'm starting with a piece on the record Baumgartner broke.

At an altitude of 90,000 feet, freefalling at 615 miles per hour, United States Air Force captain Joseph Kittinger began to slow down. His translucent mylar helium balloon was long gone, drifting away like an airborne jellyfish; otherwise it was hard for him to gauge his speed by sight. “When you’re 20 miles above the earth, there are no visual cues,” he’d later say – just the azure-white bend of the clouded earth, the blackness of space, and a dark blue horizon line as one bled into the other.

It was 10:12 a.m. EDT on the morning of August 16, 1960, and Kittinger was executing the culminating experiment of a military program that combined sheer gutsiness and pragmatic research to serve a rising nation’s flight into the future.

The name of the program was Project Excelsior, and it took place in the years between the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 and President Kennedy’s 1961 vow to develop a focused national space program. America was dedicating significant resources to expanding its technological and military capabilities, and programs like Excelsior -- Latin for “higher” -- were focal points of both strategic interest and national myth-building.

Excelsior’s primary objective was straightforward. Jet engines meant that new aircraft went really high and really fast, and a new system was needed to assure that pilots bailing out in the earth’s hostile upper atmosphere survived. The secondary purpose was to test how a human being wearing only protective suiting could survive and function above “Armstrong’s Line” (around 65,000 feet), where low atmospheric pressure and temperature would incapacitate and kill anyone inadequately shielded.

Success meant navigating between two contradictory imperatives. Earlier tests had confirmed that a bailing pilot could not deploy a parachute in the stratosphere. Terminal velocity through the thin air was too high, and the environment too killing: a 1943 test-pilot had nearly died when the 40-g shock of releasing a chute at 40,000 feet had knocked him unconscious at a freezing, suffocating altitude. The jumper needed to freefall into the lower atmosphere before pulling the cord. This, however, introduced the “deathspin” problem. Testing had demonstrated that humans would spin upon reaching terminal velocity, and fast: up to 200 revolutions per minute, at which rate centrifugal force would overpower the heart’s ability to pump blood away from the extremities. Project Excelsior had to perfect a system that allowed a falling body to drop to safe atmosphere quickly, without inducing a fatal spin.

The falling body who’d be testing the system was Joseph Kittinger, a thin, red-haired Floridian with thick, amiable features. He’d been a test-pilot on projects dedicated to flying faster and higher since 1954. The team included a flight surgeon, veteran parachute packers, pressure suit experts, and Francis Beaupre, the designer of the parachute system that (the Air Force hoped) solved the spin conundrum.  The key element of Beaupre’s system was a small, stabilizing parachute that deployed shortly after the jumper began descent, not to slow the fall but to lift center of gravity and thus avoid deadspin.

Excelsior’s development process was iterative and incremental -- endless brainstorming what-if sessions, establishing fail-safes for all imaginable contingencies. Some of those increments, of course, involved Kittinger leaping out of gondolas tens of thousands of feet above the earth. The August 1960 jump, actually the project’s third, was aimed at testing the systems from over 100,000 feet. In footage of the morning’s preparations, Kittinger’s eyes peek out watchful and still, marking the team latching and double-checking his gear: the bulky pressure suit and helmet that would allow him to survive temperatures of minus-104 degrees Fahrenheit and air pressure so low that the moisture in his lungs and mouth would boil if exposed; Beaupre’s multi-parachute system; the bright orange instrument panel strapped to his rear-end. It took two team members, arms hooked under his, to hoist Kittinger up into the balloon’s gondola.

Ninety-one minutes later, the captain stood 102,800 feet -- about 20 miles -- above the surface of the earth. A small yellow sign, affixed with red duct tape to the gondola’s edge, confirmed: “THIS IS THE HIGHEST STEP IN THE WORLD. “I said a silent prayer, and I jumped,” Kittinger later recalled. “The most beautiful view came in the first few seconds … It was very quiet, very still … It seemed that the balloon was drifting up, away from me into a very dark blue sky.” Kittinger accelerated rapidly through frigid darkness, and his stabilizing chute deployed successfully after about 15 seconds. He freefell for four-and-a-half minutes, his only frame of reference the cloud layer that eventually rose up to envelop him, obscuring the canopy of space. Finally, his main parachute deployed at around 20,000 feet, and after nine minutes of conventional descent he landed on a brushy patch of New Mexico desert near the village of Tularosa. His instrument box did not disengage as intended, and bruised his leg badly. This was the only injury he sustained.       

“Space” officially begins 62 miles above us. Kittinger never made it there: News coverage of his record-breaking jump mooted him as a possible astronaut, but he wound up serving at lower altitudes as an air commander in Vietnam, where he was shot down during a voluntary third tour and spent nearly a year as a POW. He made it safely home, and in 1984 completed the first solo balloon flight across the Atlantic. Beaupre’s system, validated by the last two Excelsior jumps, was widely influential on designs still used today to save pilots ejecting from high-altitude aircraft. And inevitably, daredevils are still trying to break the Excelsior records for highest parachute jump, longest freefall (with a stabilizing chute), and highest human velocity through the atmosphere. Kittinger has advised some such efforts, such as Austrian Felix Baumgartner’s ongoing project to make a 120,000 foot, sound-barrier breaking leap.

Kittinger and his team weren’t out to set records, however. “We did it to gather information,” he later said. “My job was to discover things while falling.” And footage from the 35-mm motor-driven camera affixed to the bottom of his gondola shows just that: a man in grey jumpsuit and white helmet, dark against the contoured cloud background below, feet pedaling slightly as he plummets to earth, strapped tight into the ingenuity that will see him safely home.