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Lieut. Colonel John Paul Stapp is a shortish (5 ft. 8 in.) bachelor with a small, neat paunch. He speaks with professorial precision, wears gold-rimmed glasses, likes to cook, grows roses and plays golf badly. His job in aviation medicine is to study the effect of bailing out of speeding jet planes into fiercely buffeting air. Since jet planes flying at safe altitudes are inconvenient laboratories, especially for observing the effects of rapid stops, he uses the most horrifying vehicle ever devised by man: a sled pushed on rails by a cluster of roaring rockets. As an experimental subject...
...only dummies have ridden in this disquieting sled, which can withstand forces up to 100G's. So when Lieut. Colonel John P. Stapp, 43 (TIME, January 18), head of the test project, called for human volunteers a fortnight ago, he could not have been sure how many would respond. Flying at the speed of sound in a comfortable airplane designed for the purpose is not the same thing as sliding at the same speed in a rocket-pushed sled at zero altitude...
Last week Colonel Stapp reported happily that he already has more volunteers than he can handle. He also announced that the first man to ride in the roaring sled would be Volunteer John P. Stapp...
Champion G-survivor, so far, is Lieut. Colonel John P. Stapp, a husky flight surgeon whose sled rocketed at 175 m.p.h. before being braked. He was strapped facing backward in a specially built seat, which is what saved him. He took 46.8 Gs for .008 seconds (equivalent to running an automobile into a solid brick wall at 120 m.p.h.). His body at the moment of impact weighed close to four tons, and his blood was more than three times as heavy as mercury...
Nashville's plugging has so far raised Smith's income to nearly $1,500 a week, promises to push it even higher. Says WSM Program Director Jack Stapp, the Rudolf Bing of Grand Ole Opry: "He's going like wildfire." Says Smith in his soft Tennessee drawl: "I'm very well pleased...