The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum awarded their highest honor to the relatively unknown (outside the aerospace community) Col. Joe Kittinger last week. Kittinger was honored for his work on the U.S. Air Force Project Excelsior program of the late 50s and early 60s, in which he bailed out of a balloon at high altitudes to test parachute and life support technology. Kittinger still holds the record for highest parachute jump, at 102,800 feet and longest free fall. I heard Kittinger give an entertaining and detailed talk at a conference a few years back, and he recalled not only his work on Project Excelsior, but his later career accomplishments as a fighter pilot in Viet Nam.

While the general media reported last week about Kittinger's free fall accomplishments, few mentioned why these tests were conducted. (Several of the news organizations reported Kittinger "jumped from space", which really isn't correct, since most scientific organizations agree that space doesn't begin until 100 km, or about 328,000 feet above the surface of the earth.) In the late 50s, aircraft were flying ever faster and higher, and engineers were also starting to plan for rockets to take man to space. Many physiological questions remained about what would happen to a human if they had to eject from a very high flying aircraft, or during the early stages of a rocket launch. So the Air Force conducted a series of tests using high altitude balloons and pressurized gondolas to test life support and escape systems. These culminated in the successful jumps by Kittinger, which showed that drogue chutes and parachutes could be designed to safely stabilize, decelerate, and recover a pilot if they had to escape an aircraft or rocket at very high altitudes.

An interesting aside to Project Excelsior is some earlier Air Force balloon work that preceded this program, and how that work may be used to explain the famous "Roswell Incident", where a UFO supposedly crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico, and "dead aliens" were found in the wreckage. It's quite possible that some of these early Air Force balloon programs were the predecessor to Project Excelsior. It's very common to use anthropomorphic manikins (i.e. crash test dummies) to test a high-risk aerospace system before a human ever gets on board, and the Air Force admits that they used such dummies in some of the New Mexico balloon programs of the 40s and 50s. If you have ever seen pictures of these test manikins, you can see how the hairless, pinkish rubber skin, and featureless heads of these manikins could be mistaken for an alien if someone of dubious intelligence stumbled upon a balloon wreckage in the middle of the desert.