Word: balloon
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...ground crew filled his 400-ft. balloon with helium. Kittinger climbed awkwardly into the open gondola...
Promptly at 5:30, the ground crew un leashed the tugging balloon and Kittinger started soaring off into space. As the atmosphere thinned out, he noticed that one of his pressure gloves wasn't working right, was cutting off circulation and causing his hand to swell. Being Joe Kittinger, he did not mention that detail in his radio reports to the ground until it was too late for the medical team to order him down without completing his mission...
High above the earth, Kittinger studied a frontier that few men have seen. "Up there,'' he recalled afterwards, "the sky looked dark enough to see stars as one would at twilight on earth." Up, up, up the balloon rose, to 98,800 ft. above the ground (102,800 ft. above sea level), higher than any human being had ever soared before in nonpowered flight. Shortly after 7 a.m., Kittinger ticked off his go-second countdown in radio communication with the ground. Then he "asked the Lord for help," flopped over the side of the gondola, and began...
...Down. Within 18 seconds, Kittinger's stabilizing chute opened, but for more than four minutes more he plummeted in free fall, reaching a velocity of 614 m.p.h. "I fell on my right side for about eight seconds," he says. "Then I found myself on my back watching the balloon recede above me. The sky was almost black. It was a beautiful thing to see. I had a sensation of lying still while the balloon raced away from me. I didn't feel hot or cold, just the right temperature. There was very little spinning...
Long & Hard. The biggest man-made object ever placed in space, Echo I is a plastic balloon as high as a ten-story building, with an aluminum coat that refleets radiomagnetic waves of frequencies up to 20.000 megacycles. Its skin is only .0005 in. thick-about half as thick as the cellophane on a pack of cigarettes. Packed accordion-fashion into the nose of a Thor-Delta rocket fired from Cape Canaveral, the 136-lb. satellite was filled with sublimating powders that expanded into gas in the direct rays of the sun and caused the balloon to inflate itself...