It is Aug. 16, 1960, and Joe Kittinger is a dead man. Almost everyone who knows what he is about to do says so. The timeless Air Force maxim, ”There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots,” guarantees it.
At 31, Capt. Joe Kittinger has waxed overbold, even in the elite fast-track crowd of experimental test pilots for whom the probability of instant death is a routine occupational hazard. But Kittinger`s fondest dreams always have been the stuff of most people`s nightmares, and on this day, in the first unsure dawn of the space age, he brings one of them into adrenalin-soaked reality under the title of Project Excelsior.
Clad in an experimental pressure suit, he climbs into the open gondola of a helium balloon and rides it to 102,800 feet-nearly 20 miles-above the scruffy greasewood desert of Tularosa Valley just outside Alamogordo, N.M. With 99.2 percent of the Earth`s atmosphere beneath him and the sun blazing above him against the velvet black of space, he steps out and falls . . . .
For 16 miles he hurtles through a silent, subzero void, eventually hitting a velocity of 714 miles per hour and thereby becoming the first and only person ever to surpass the speed of sound without benefit of an aircraft. The bank of clouds looming up beneath him before he opens his parachute look so formidable that ”I draw up my legs because it is as if I am about to be slammed into a brick wall. I know better, but I draw my legs up anyway.”
Recalling that feat, Kittinger, a garrulous tank of a man with a shock of red hair and a bristling mustache to match, grins like a kid at a carnival. The image of test-pilot-as-hero-the steely-eyed demigod pursuing the high frontier as though it were the Holy Grail-fits him the way a Homburg might fit Huckleberry Finn. He is a kid who early on determined that since there was no fun in growing up, he just wouldn`t do it. At 58, he remains adamant on the point.
”It was a blast,” he says. ”I was the original conservationist. I went faster than sound, and I didn`t use any energy.”
Joe Kittinger no longer jumps out of balloons. He flies them now-mostly for the tourist trade at Rosie O`Grady`s Flying Circus, of which he is ringmaster, in Orlando-but none of the old urge to shoot dice with death has departed. His ultimate goal still lies ahead: a solo nonstop flight around the world, suspended from a helium balloon at 50,000 feet, where the jet stream is a raging river of wind in which one mishap could deliver his obituary.
Kittinger, a battle-scarred Peter Pan who counts broken bones and brushes with eternity the way many people count the hours until quitting time, still lives as though he hopes the next 10 minutes will toss another ordinary man`s nightmare into his playpen.
”From the time I was a kid, I never wanted to do anything but fly airplanes and have adventures,” he says. ”When I was about 3 years old, my dad took me up in an old Ford trimotor, and I think that clinched it. It`s my earliest memory. From then on, all I did was build models and hang out here at the airport, watching pilots and begging for a ride. When I grow up, I want be exactly what I am right now.”
Former astronaut Alan Shepard, who has, on occasion, rolled a few sevens against death himself, remembers his onetime colleague in the test-pilot business with a touch of awe.
`We were contemporaries, and we had some good times, but I never would do any of the crazy things he did,” Shepard says in a telephone interview from his Houston-based construction firm. ”Would I have jumped out of that balloon? That`s easy. Hell, no, absolutely not.”
Kittinger, who did not die in Project Excelsior or in any one of half-a-dozen other potentially lethal experiments, offers the only explanation he finds necessary. ”Life is an adventure, or it`s nothing at all,” he says. When Kittinger made his ”Long, Lonely Leap”-the title of a book he subsequently wrote about the experience-he did not do it for thrills. He did it for science.
”It was absolutely vital,” says Gordon Cooper, another old friend and former astronaut who now runs a consulting business in Los Angeles. ”We had to know if we could build the right kind of equipment to sustain life, and certainly Joe`s job was the ideal test of hardware and equipment for fighter pilots flying at very high altitudes. We didn`t have any idea about the body`s stability at high altitudes or what kind of dynamics the human body would go through or how to build a drogue chute that would stabilize it. It was totally unknown. Everybody who came along conjectured a different theory. You never knew whether any of them had any merit or were totally wrong until it was done. You had to send a guy up to do it.”
”It was a fabulous program,” Cooper says of Project Excelsior. ”I don`t know if I`d have made that jump or not. It was way, way out for those times. It still is. It`s never even come close to being equaled. I was in flying school with Joe. We go that far back. He`s one fine pilot.”
The Excelsior jump was the climax of three years of lower leaps, both in the Excelsior series and in an earlier one dubbed ”Man High.” Excelsior jumps involved plunges from 76,000 feet and 75,000 feet as warmups for the big one. In the leap from 76,000 feet, Kittinger proved what wind-tunnel tests had predicted, that a man`s body falling so far and so fast could go into a deadly flat spin during which centrifugal force would slam a potentially lethal volume of blood into his brain.
Kittinger had an experimental drogue chute that its designer, Francis Beaupre of the USAF Aerospace Medical Division, hoped would prevent that, but the first time Kittinger used it, it deployed prematurely, wrapping its shrouds around his neck. His body went into the predicted spin, hitting a rotation Kittinger now estimates to have been ”between 85 and 120 r.p.m.”
Kittinger was quoted then as saying ”pilot error” was to blame in that he made his exit the wrong way, triggering the chute. Today he gruffly denies that.
”It was a problem that came out because of a change in some hardware, and when I jumped, instead of falling for 16 seconds before the drogue chute came out, it came out after 2 seconds,” he
says. ”It was a procedural problem and an equipment problem, and we fixed it. I did become unconscious because of the spinning. The reserve chute was set to deploy automatically at 10,000 feet, and it saved my life.”
Even the 20-mile Excelsior III leap brought Kittinger as close to the edge of catastrophe as he had been to the edge of space. The cuff fastening his right glove to the pressure suit failed, leaving him with an immobilized hand, painfully swollen after it had almost literally exploded in the short time that it was unprotected in the near vacuum at the edge of space. Kittinger knew the cuff would malfunction before he jumped but didn`t report it to ground control because ”they might have called off the mission.”
What Excelsior had in store for Kittinger, however, transcended the mere nightmare of falling. Its second phase might have been torn straight from the pulp pages of an early science-fiction novel.
He would be stuffed, he was told, into the nose cone of a Redstone rocket that would then be fired into space. As the rocket ascended through the 100,000-foot level, Kittinger would bail out and go on a climbing trajectory that would carry his body to an altitude of 100 miles before he started his free fall. That mission was suddenly aborted when the Russians made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first man to go in orbit around the Earth, and in the mad scramble to launch the Mercury series, of which Shepard was the first astronaut, Excelsior was cancelled. Anyone else might have breathed a secret sigh of relief, but not Kittinger.
”It could have been done, and I wish it had,” he says with a regret that still lingers. ”I would have hit terminal velocity, but when I came back to 100,000 feet, I would have been going the same speed as I was after I jumped out of the balloon, which was Mach 1 (the speed of sound). That was going to be an exciting project. I have every confidence that I could have done that. With the right team, I`d do it now.”
The ”team” for Kittinger and fellow test-pilot David G. Simons, who specialized in setting time-aloft records, was essentially one man, and Kittinger never has forgotten him. He is Dr. John Paul Stapp, the Air Force colonel who headed the aerospace lab and directed the Man High and Excelsior projects.
”He is the bravest man I`ve ever known,” Kittinger says with the ferocity of one defending a personal hero. ”When I was doing my test, he was my sponsor, and there were a lot of people who said I was going to be killed, that nobody could ever do it, but he approved it because he had confidence in me and he knew we should do it. If we were going to go into space, we had to have that information. But if I had gotten killed, he would have been there forever for them to hound and ridicule. It took more courage for him to approve my experiments than for me to do them.”
Stapp, now 77 and retired in Alamogordo, burst briefly into the public consciousness in 1954 when, in an effort to learn how much gravitational stress the human body could take, he more than qualified for the right to send Kittinger on a life-threatening mission for the sake of science. Strapping himself onto a rocket-propelled sled, Stapp rode it to a speed of 632 m.p.h. before it slammed to a sudden stop in a water trough.
In the process, Stapp`s body pulled 20 G`s on acceleration followed immediately by 40 G`s in the opposite direction when the sled stopped. A ”G” is a gravitational unit equal, under the Newtonian laws of motion, to the weight of the object affected. At 40 G`s, the weight of Stapp`s body and every organ in it increased 40 times. At 632 m.p.h., sand grains penetrated his flight suit like shotgun pellets, and the massive weight increase so damaged his eyes that they later developed cataracts.
Stapp, who retains an encyclopedic recall of events, places and dates, proves himself still an unorthodox, rule-bending rebel-in short, a fitting partner in any enterprise for Joe Kittinger. He denies press reports at the time of the initial sled ride that said he was critically injured and left in a coma.
”I`ve never been unconscious from a sled run, and I`ve had 29 of them,” he says. ”They took me to the base hospital, and I had two lunches because I hadn`t had any breakfast. Then I spent the afternoon on the telephone. I think I made myself so obnoxious they were glad to get rid of me.”
Stapp describes his work with Kittinger as ”bootleg research”-
unofficial projects with funding and authorization usually secured at lower levels in the chain of command, often leaving the top brass and politicians ignorant about what was going on until after the fact. It was an activity bound to make enemies.
”It was so bootleg that when Joe made the Man High I flight on June 2, 1957, we had an overrun of about $20,000, and if we`d had any failure, the hammer would have come down on me as chief of the laboratory,” he says.
”Then, on Aug. 16-20, Simons stayed up 32 hours and 10 minutes, and this time our cost overrun was over $60,000. If there had been a failure there, they would have sent me to Leavenworth, I guess.”
Stapp, a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in biophysics, battled for his projects and his men, often going over the heads of naysayers to get programs reinstated after they had been canceled. Out of his sled-ride series came the automotive seat belts now mandatory in 31 states, and out of Kittinger`s jumps came the pressure suits and escape systems used in every American space shot from Gemini to Apollo.
Deke Slayton, another former astronaut, sums up the importance of the pressure suits and escape systems. ”We knew damned little at that point in time,” he says in a telephone interview from his Houston-based space development-and-design company. ”That was an ambitious thing he did, and it was a valuable thing for the space program because when we got into Gemini, we had ejection seats for the first time, and a lot of the information Joe gathered went right into the design. He also tested prototypes of the pressure suits we wore.”
Stapp says the benefits, however, never outweighed the animosity. ”I still have permanent, bitter enemies in the Air Force,” he says with a chuckle. ”I call them the `Stamp Out Stapp Club.` They would have clobbered me dead for the small overruns in our small budget if they could have. Progress is achieved at the expense of those who do it.”
Progress, for Kittinger, might have been excelsior-ever higher-into space as an astronaut, but two things got in his way: his dedication to the research work he was doing for Stapp-work that eventually included the hauling of an optical telescope and an astronomer to the edge of space for the first look, unimpeded by atmosphere, at the stars-and a war. The war nearly proved to be his last adventure.
By the late 1960s American involvement in Vietnam had exploded into a major conflagration, and Kittinger, by then a lieutenant colonel, volunteered for a piece of the action. He was on his third tour of duty, with 483 combat missions to his credit, when disaster struck.
He had bagged one Russian-built MiG and was locked onto another in May, 1972, when his F4 Phantom jet was blind-sided by an air-to-air missile. He and his navigator ejected, 30 miles north of Saigon, and fell right into the hands of the North Vietnamese. It was the beginning of 11 months of hell at the
”Hanoi Hilton,” as their infamous prison camp was dubbed, and of memories that have lost none of their bitterness over the years. Like many a veteran of that conflict, he feels no need for a treatise on constitutional law; his opinions are his own, and they are cast in steel.
”I don`t believe in freedom of the press in a combat situation,” he says. ”I think that`s a bunch of bull. The day I got shot down, there was an article in Stars and Stripes saying Lt. Col. Joe Kittinger was missing in action. This was his third combat tour, and he was squadron commander of the Triple-Nickel, the squadron that had shot down the most MiGs in Vietnam.
”I was tortured for a month by the North Vietnamese because of information they were reading in the damn newspaper. They had everything on me. They knew what I`d done. They knew I had the world`s record for parachute jumps. They knew I had shot down a MiG and was a famous fighter pilot. They really thought they had a plum.”
When he was shot down, Kittinger suffered a severe shrapnel wound in his leg. Denied medical treatment, it soon festered into a blazing agony, to which he says his captors methodically added.
”I was put into ropes, with an iron bar behind my arms and my body bent backward over it,” he says. ”I was beaten. I had busted eardrums. I was severely tortured because they wanted to turn me into a propaganda ploy and make me go before a television camera. I prayed for death many times rather than give in to the bastards, and many times I was ready to break. If they`d just tortured me for five seconds more, I`d have been ready to quit. It was that close. We ought to lock up newspaper reporters and never, ever, let them go into combat (areas).”
All bitterness ends for Kittinger, however, when asked whether he should have stayed in research and development as a possible entry into the space program rather than volunteering for Vietnam.
”I never regretted the decision,” he says. ”Even though I didn`t go into space, I helped people get there. I would have loved to have been part of it, but I never regretted any decision I ever made. I don`t believe in looking back and saying, `I should have done this,` or, `I should have done that.` I wouldn`t have done anything different in my whole life. I could have stayed in research and development and gotten deeply involved in Apollo and other exotic space ventures, but I was a fighter pilot, and I felt I owed it to my Air Force and my country to go to Vietnam. I guess it was a simplistic view, but that`s how I felt.”
