As a boy, Joe like many kids of his age wanted to be a fighter pilot and at age 22 Joe was doing just that, storming through the skies of Germany with the 86th Fighter Bomber Squadron. It wasn’t long though before Joe was called upon to bigger things. Even before there was a space program he was planning for it, volunteering himself for experiments which would make even Bruce Banner wince with fear, most notably the human decelerator where he went from over 600 mph to zero in just a few feet, blistering his body and making his eyes bleed from the 41g he pulled in breaking.
Thankfully not all the experiments were as life threatening as the human decelerator. One of Joe’s early tests for example was investigating zero gravity which involved him swooping and diving in his plane with a golf ball attached to a piece of string “When the golf ball floated, that was zero gravity”. Some of course were far more grand in scale and with ‘Project Man High’ Joe took a balloon up to the dizzying heights of 96,000ft paving the way for the NASA’s human space flight program ‘Project Mercury’. Not bad for a 29 year old but his real challenge was still to come.
On Aug. 16, 1960, Joe, now Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger, rode a helium balloon to the edge of space, 102,800 feet (32 km) above the earth.
Wearing just a thin pressure suit and breathing supplemental oxygen, Joe jumped from his gondola into the 110-degree-below-zero, near-vacuum of space. Within seconds his body accelerated to 714 mph in the thin air, breaking the sound barrier. After free-falling for more than four and a half minutes, his descent finally began to slow due to the friction of the heavier air below. He felt his parachute open at 14,000 feet, and he floated gently down to the New Mexico desert floor.
Joe’s feat proved to scientists that astronauts would be able to survive the harshness of space with just a pressure suit and that man could eject from aircraft at extreme altitudes and survive if properly equipped.
More than four decades later, Joe’s two world records, the highest parachute jump, and the only man to break the sound barrier without a craft and live, still stand, and the retired colonel and Aviation Hall of Famer, now 75, still rides the sky above Altamonte Springs in Florida as often as he can.