Word: ballooned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...lived in space, and only one man has spent more than a moment on the border of space. That man is wiry, redheaded Air Force Captain Joe W. Kittinger, 28, whose balloon of bubble-thin plastic last week rose to a record-breaking 96,000 ft. (TIME, June 10). His flight was planned by Lieut. Colonel John Paul Stapp, head of the Air Force's Aero Medical Laboratory, as an approach to the bristling problem of staying alive in space...
...want much," says Stapp. "Just the sharpest pilot I ever met." Kittinger, the man selected, already knew his way in the air. He was an F-100 pilot with 3,600 jet hours, but Stapp had him take special training for ten months. He qualified as a balloon pilot, also got a paratrooper's rating by making ten parachute jumps. He learned to fly helicopters (often an unnerving experience for an airplane pilot) and took ten claustrophobia tests (24 hours each, sealed in a capsule). He worked with the experts of Winzen Research, Inc. of Minneapolis, makers...
While Kittinger was being denitrogenized, the balloon was lying flat and limp on South St. Paul's Fleming Field. An Air Force crew turned helium into it, and bit by bit a bubble of plastic reared upward. At last the balloon, as tall as a 25-story building, was standing upright in the still early-morning air. At 6:27 a.m., it took off. Kittinger, his heartbeat still steady, radioed "Goodbye, cruel world...
...balloon rose almost vertically, swelling toward its full 2,000,000 cu. ft. as the pressure diminished. Kittinger kept reading over the radio an endless succession of instruments, stealing a glance once in a while through one of the six portholes. The sky was turning a darker blue, and Minnesota below him was fading to a featureless grey...
Guided by Colonel John P. Stapp (TIME, Sept. 12, 1955), boss of the Air Force's Aero Medical Laboratories, eager Jet Pilot Kittinger, 28, climbed into an instrument-cramped, air-conditioned gondola, was borne upward by a huge helium-filled plastic balloon as ground crews tracked his progress. Kittinger took only 80 minutes to reach the 18-mile mark, spent two hours at peak height before failure of his voice transmitter promoted safety-conscious Supervisor Stapp to order him to earth...