Jumping out of a gondola assembled at Wright-Patterson and sent aloft under a giant helium balloon, Kittinger was testing the limits of the highest parachute jump ever attempted on the research flight. It was called Project Excelsior.
His record-setting jump would stand more than half a century until Felix Baumgartner broke it, with the help of Kittinger. Baumgartner jumped 25,000 feet higher on Oct. 14, 2012.
In an interview with the Dayton Daily News, Kittinger, 85, shared memories of both historic jumps prior to a presentation Tuesday at a Aviation Trail Inc. event at the Presidential Banquet Center in Kettering.
Kittinger was an adviser to the Red Bull Stratos team that sponsored Baumgartner’s jump over the New Mexico desert and celebrated breaking his old record.
“I was delighted because we had all worked for that goal,” said Kittinger, who was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1997. “ I was delighted because it was safely done, he wasn’t hurt, and we had accomplished all of our objectives.”
The Red Bull Stratos capsule and pressure suit will be displayed at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force between Jan. 24 to March 16, officials said. The museum has an exhibit about Kittinger’s jump, too.
Since his descent, “almost every week or so, I would get an email, or a telephone call or a letter from somebody all over the world looking to beat my record,” Kittinger said. “I turned them all down because I didn’t want to get involved where somebody might get killed. Most of the people had no idea how hostile space is or how to accomplish the jump and all of them wanted to make one jump (at) maximum altitude.”
He said he was persuaded to work with Baumgartner and his team because of the promise the attempt would yield important science, such as a pressure suit for future space exploration. He was confident the descent out of the dark sky could happen safely with Baumgartner, who had logged 2,500 parachute jumps.
Baumgartner reached 843 miles per hour, or Mach 1.25, and descended 127,852 feet, according to mission figures.
“He went extremely fast,” Kittinger said. “When he went supersonic, he did not feel it, but people on the ground heard the boom …. the supersonic boom. He had no way of knowing when he went supersonic because he was falling in a vacuum. There’s no air there.”
Kittinger kept radio communications with Baumgartner while he fell to Earth. “But he never talked and I kept encouraging him to talk, but he was very busy,” Kittinger said.
Baumgartner spun at 60 revolutions per minute. “Even though he was an experienced skydiver, he could not control the spinning,” Kittinger said. Once Baumgartner’s parachute popped open, he started to talk to Kittinger.
The experience proved what Kittinger had known since 1960: A drogue parachute attached to a main parachute stabilizes objects falling to earth. That knowledge led to drogue chutes on ejection seats in military jets, he said. The supersonic descent did not adversely affect Baumgartner’s body, Kittinger said.
Kittinger, a former fighter pilot and POW in Vietnam, served 29 years in the Air Force. Both in military and civilian cockpits, he has tallied 16,800 hours in the air in 93 different aircraft.
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