Joe Kittinger, Excelsior Three, and the Step Off the Edge of Space on August Sixteenth, Nineteen Sixty

On August 16, 1960, U.S. Air Force test pilot Captain Joseph W. Kittinger II rode an open balloon gondola to 102,800 feet - better than 19 miles straight up - and then stepped off into near-space. His four-and-a-half-minute free fall, part of the Air Force’s Project Excelsior, proved that a human being could bail out from the edge of the atmosphere and survive, setting altitude, free-fall, and speed records that would stand for 52 years.

Who Was Joe Kittinger?

Joe Kittinger was a test pilot and fighter jock who had already flown weather research and pushed aircraft to their limits by the time the Air Force came looking for him. He was known as a pilot who didn’t rattle - disciplined, cool under pressure, and steady enough to ride a balloon to the top of the sky and jump.

He was born to fly. After Project Excelsior, he flew combat in Vietnam, was shot down, and spent nearly a year as a prisoner of war. Later, he became the first person to fly a balloon solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He died in 2022 at the age of 94.

What Was Project Excelsior?

By 1960, the jet age was young and hungry. Aircraft were climbing higher and flying faster than anyone had imagined possible just fifteen years earlier - and that created a life-or-death question the Air Force couldn’t answer.

If a pilot had to bail out at 60,000, 70,000, or 80,000 feet, where the air is so thin it may as well not exist, would the parachute work? Would the human body survive the fall? Nobody knew, because no one had done it and lived to file the report.

So the Air Force launched Project Excelsior - Latin for “ever upward” - to find out. The plan was simple to describe and terrifying to execute: ride a balloon to the edge of the atmosphere in an open gondola, then jump.

The Near-Fatal First Jump

Excelsior I nearly killed Kittinger. A timer on his small stabilizing parachute malfunctioned, deploying the chute too early. It wrapped around his neck and threw him into a flat spin on the way down from 76,000 feet.

He was spinning so violently - later estimated at roughly 120 revolutions per minute - that the force knocked him unconscious. What saved his life was his main emergency chute, which opened automatically while he hung there limp. Most men would have quit. Kittinger went back up twice more.

The Excelsior III Jump: August 16, 1960

Before dawn over the New Mexico desert near Tularosa, the ground crew laid out an enormous plastic balloon - one so large that, fully inflated at altitude, it stood taller than a skyscraper. Kittinger suited up in a partial pressure suit, gloves, and helmet to survive temperatures that would plunge to 90 degrees below zero.

Then the trouble started, on the ground. The pressure seal in his right glove failed, and his hand began to swell. He knew that reporting it would get the mission scrubbed - so he said nothing and flew anyway. By the top of the climb, that hand had swelled to twice its normal size and was useless. He didn’t tell anyone until he was already on the way up.

The ascent took about 90 minutes. The gondola creaked upward through darkening blue sky until it finally stopped at 102,800 feet - above 99 percent of the atmosphere, nearly three times higher than an airliner cruises. The sky above him was black and full of stars while the sun blazed, and below him lay the curving Earth.

A plaque on the gondola read: “This is the highest step in the world.” Kittinger moved to a small aluminum step on the outside, looked down at the whole planet, and stepped off.

How Fast Did Joe Kittinger Fall?

Up that high, the air is so thin there is almost nothing to feel - no wind, no rush, no sense of speed. Kittinger said afterward that he had no sensation of falling whatsoever. He looked up and saw the balloon apparently shooting away from him, when in fact it was he who was dropping.

With almost no air to slow him, he accelerated to 614 miles per hour in free fall - faster than many propeller-driven fighters could fly. Whether he technically broke the sound barrier in that thin air is still debated, but he came right up near it.

He fell for four and a half minutes, the longest free fall a human had ever made. As the air thickened, his stabilizing chute finally caught correctly - no killing spin this time - and around 18,000 feet his main canopy bloomed open. The whole descent from the step to the sand took over 13 minutes. Once he reached thicker air, the swelling in his hand went down and it was fine. He had gambled, and he had been right.

Why the Jump Mattered for Pilots and Astronauts

When his boots hit the desert, Kittinger held records for the highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest free fall, and fastest speed by a human through the atmosphere without an aircraft.

But he didn’t do it for glory or as a stunt. He did it to prove the equipment worked - that the pressure suit would hold and the parachute would deploy - so the next generation of pilots and astronauts could trust their escape systems. Every high-altitude ejection and every astronaut who ever relied on a pressure suit owes something to what Kittinger proved with his own body over Tularosa.

Felix Baumgartner and Passing the Torch

In 2012 - 52 years after Excelsior III - skydiver Felix Baumgartner finally broke Kittinger’s altitude and speed records, jumping from higher, going faster, and clearly breaking the sound barrier before a worldwide audience.

The calm voice in Baumgartner’s ear from mission control was Joe Kittinger, then 84 years old - the only living man who knew what it felt like to stand on that step and look down at the curve of the Earth. The old captain guiding the young one home is about as clean an example of aviation passing the torch as you’ll ever find.

Key Takeaways

On August 16, 1960, Joe Kittinger stepped from a balloon at 102,800 feet (over 19 miles up) as part of the Air Force’s Project Excelsior.
He free-fell for four and a half minutes, reaching 614 mph - the longest and fastest human free fall of its time.
He flew despite a failed right glove that swelled his hand to twice its size; the swelling reversed once he returned to normal pressure.
His jump proved that pressure suits and parachutes could save pilots and astronauts bailing out at the edge of space.
His altitude and speed records stood for 52 years until Felix Baumgartner broke them in 2012, with Kittinger himself talking Baumgartner through the jump.