The Pre-Astronauts Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space

by Craig Ryan

Review by Tom Hamilton

“Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, before liquid-fuel rockets had launched us full-sail onto what John Kennedy would call the “new ocean,” a small fraternity of daring, brilliant men made the first exploratory trips into the upper stratosphere to the edge of outer space in tiny capsules suspended beneath plastic balloons. They saw things no one had ever seen, and they experienced conditions no one was sure they could survive. This book tells the story of these brave and tenacious men as they labored on the cusp of a new age.” Book jacket The Pre-Astronauts.

Before Sputnik, Mercury, Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard, or John Glenn there was Manhigh, Excelsior, John Paul Sapp, and Joe Kittinger. Projects and people who went where no man had gone before—to the edge of space.

Many have seen the picture of a young Air Force Captain, Joe Kittinger jumping from the open gondola of a balloon at 102,800 feet above the earth. Kittinger became the only person to exceed the speed of sound without the aid of a vehicle and still holds the record for highest parachute jump. But, did you know that part of his flight suit had failed and his right hand was in great pain? Information he withheld from ground control until ninety seconds before he jumped.

The book takes the reader from Hawthorne Gray’s fatal attempt to fly a balloon above 40,000 feet in the late 1920s through the Explorer projects of the 1930s to a military base in the New Mexico desert. Holloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Range had already gained notoriety on July 16, 1945 with the detonation of the first Atomic bomb.

In the 1950s a group of people would come to this remote site, some by chance, and form the nucleus of a team that would write an extraordinary chapter in space exploration. John Paul Stapp headed most of the projects. It is his rocket sled experiments that lead to the use of seat belts in cars today. And, it was his leadership that ushered projects like Manhigh and Excelsior through a bureaucratic nightmare.

Reaching the edge of space was not designed as pre-rocket space exploration. These projects were looking for safe ways to return pilots of jet aircraft back to earth should they have to bail out above 40,000 feet. Dollar for dollar they probably returned more valuable information than any other manned high altitude research. They operated on limited budgets, often with bootleg money from other projects.

This book tells of the cadre of dedicated military officers and civilian contractors, their struggles with limited resources, and each other. Doctors, physicists, meteorologists, engineers, astronomers, and test pilots, they made tremendous personal sacrifices and took great risks for the promise of adventure and the opportunity to uncover a few precious secrets of the universe.

Captain Joseph Kittinger would make five high altitude flights, Lt. Col. David Simons stayed aloft for a full day and night in a primitive pressurized capsule to become one of the first to see the curvature of the earth.

Project Mercury would adopt many of the lessons learned from these high altitude flights. Some lessons would later be lost on the Space program. Several of the people involved fault NASA for ignoring what was learned and not providing an escape system for Challenger, who’s crew was alive when it hit the ocean.

The author was able to personally interview many of the participants in the high altitude projects. Ryan’s extensive research and excellent writing makes this book a spellbinding read. It is a history of a forgotten era of aviation pioneers. You will be surprised by long forgotten revelations of these intrepid aviators. You will not be disappointed in adding this book to your collection.

The Pre-Astronauts, Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space, by Craig Ryan, 344 pages, 21 photographs, Notes, Bibliography, Index, Hardcover. $29.95 ($25.95 until August 30, 1995). Available from U.S. Navel Institute, Customer Service, Operations Center, 2062 Generals Highway, Annapolis, MD 21401-6780 or call 1-800-233-8764.