16, 1959, he rode the Excelsior I balloon to 76,400 feet and jumped. “Today, every ejection seat in the world uses a small drogue chute for stabilization,” said Kittinger. It was the forerunner of the type of equipment used in emergency ejection systems for high-speed and high-altitude aircraft. He credited Air Force technician Francis Beaupré with solving the problem through the use of a multi-stage parachute system that featured a stabilizing drogue chute. “We dropped dummies from high altitudes and they spun at around 200 rpm,” Kittinger recalled, “which was enough to kill a person.” But a more pressing problem was the tendency of human bodies falling through ultra-thin air to accelerate into uncontrollable flat spins, producing centrifugal forces sufficient to cause cerebral hemorrhage and death. This meant Kittinger would require a pressure suit for protection as he rode in an open basket beneath the helium-filled balloon. In November 1959, he traveled to New Mexico with a team of about a dozen Air Force researchers and began preparations for stratospheric balloon flights including high-altitude parachute jumps from above 63,000 feet, the altitude at which fluids in the human body begin to “boil” or vaporize at normal body temperature. There, he became test director for Project Excelsior, an investigation of the use of parachutes for escape from spacecraft or high-altitude aircraft. Kittinger told the audience how he was only a young captain when was assigned in 1958 to the Escape Section of the Aeromedical Laboratory at Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio. Kittinger II, the first man to parachute from the stratosphere in 1960 Art Thompson, technical project director for the Red Bull Stratos project, in which Felix Baumgartner broke the speed of sound in freefall after jumping from 128,100 feet in 2012 and former Google senior vice president Alan Eustace, who set the record for the highest jump two years later after being carried aloft by a balloon to an altitude of 135,890 feet. Speakers at one of several history panels included retired Air Force Col. Visitors to the recent Los Angeles County Air Show at Fox Field in Lancaster had the opportunity to find out from people who have done it. What is it like to freefall through the airless void more than 100,000 feet above the Earth?

Stratosphere freefall