 Excelsior! But Project Excelsior! Speaking of, this image is super well-recognized, but not a lot of people actually know why Joe Kittinger jumped from 102,000 feet in 1960. Well, if you don't know, I'm gonna tell ya. In the late 1950s, pilots were starting to fly a lot higher and a lot faster in airplanes that were skirting the edges of space in the case of the X-15 and multiple times the speed of sound in just regular jets, which meant that the danger factor was starting to get greater, and there was a bit of an issue when it came to the idea of pilots bailing out. In slower airplanes, if a pilot got in trouble, he would just pull the ejection cable and then be shot out and land by parachute, but you can't really do that if you're going supersonicly, or if you're flying so high that there's not enough air molecules in the atmosphere where you're at to inflate the parachute to have it bring you down slowly to the Earth. So this became a problem, or a line of inquiry rather, for the U.S. Air Force at the end of the decade. The first step in this pilot safety program was to understand what would happen to a human body if the pilot ejected a high altitude. To figure that out, scientists dropped a humanoid dummy from high altitude to see what would happen. It turns out a human body will naturally fall in a more or less prone position, but it will spin over and over as though rolling down a hill as much as 465 times a minute. The G-forces on a pilot's body in that kind of fall and spin would surely kill him, so there was no way to just have him wait to pull the cord because he would probably be passed out or dead by the time he got to the atmosphere that was dense enough to release the parachute. So there had to be another way. The answer on how to stabilize a pilot falling at high altitudes came from engineer Francis F. Vauple, who designed a stabilization system that would use sequentially deploying parachutes. Right after bailing out, the pilot would pull a cord to release an 18-inch pilot parachute. Once that was fully inflated, the pilot's shoot would pull out a 6-foot diameter stabilization parachute. Next would come the main parachute's release. It would inflate partway until the falling pilot passed through 14,000 feet as measured by a barometer on his person. Passing this altitude would trigger full release of the 28-foot diameter main parachute. It would inflate fully and he would make a nice, soft landing on Earth. It's the sequencing here that's key. If you release a large parachute in the upper atmosphere, there aren't enough air molecules to fill it out. It will just kind of stay there as a mushed-up flop of fabric that will follow you down as you fall. If it doesn't get that little bit of opening, it won't be able to inflate. So starting with the smaller parachute means that you need less air to inflate it and it doesn't need to get as big. So getting bigger slowly from the small parachute to the larger one means that as the atmosphere gets thicker, you have the better chance of each parachute inflating. So Bo-Play came up with his system, but now he needed to test it. For that, he needed a pilot and a program. It was ultimately the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at the Hallman Air Force Base that did a series of high-altitude parachute tests called Project Excelsior, wherein pilots jumped from balloons. There were only three jumps done as part of the program, the most famous of which was on August 16, 1960, by Joe Kittinger. Wearing a pressure suit, Kittinger lifted off from an old abandoned airstrip north of Tulerosa, New Mexico, in an open gondola. Once he reached his target altitude of 102,800 feet, he had 99.2% of the atmosphere beneath him. Then he jumped, and the Bo-Play multi-stage parachute system worked perfectly. After a 13-second free fall, the 6-foot parachute opened to stabilize him, stopping him from rolling the way the dummies had. After another 4 minutes and 36 seconds, he was down to about 17,500 feet where the main 28-foot parachute opened. He floated the rest of the way down to Earth. And perhaps the most incredible thing about Kittinger's jumps? He didn't do it for a ton of money. He was on payroll for the Air Force. Hopefully that gave you guys some fun trivia to whip out at awkward office parties. And if you'd like to know a little bit more about some of the fun early testing Kittinger was a part of, I do talk about some of it in my first book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity. If you have other questions about early Air Force testing programs or odd programs that you've heard of but don't really know what they were about, leave me all of that in the comment section down below. And of course, if you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. As always, you can find me all across social media for daily vintage-based content. I'm on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And of course, thank you guys so much for watching. It means a lot to me and I will see you next time.