I Am a Bullet: Scenes from an Accelerating Culture

Standing alone in the open gondola of US Air Force helium balloon Excelsior III, Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr. looks down from the rim of space. At 102,800 feet, almost 20 miles up, he floats higher than any other human has gone without jet or rocketship. The glare of the sun is like sandpaper on the eyes. The side of his body facing the raw solar heat is boiling, the other freezing. With only a standard-issue Air Force MC-3 pilot's partial-pressure suit (rather than an astronaut's full-pressure suit) keeping him from exploding into the near vacuum of the upper stratosphere, his toes stick out the doorway with 99 percent of Earth's atmosphere below him. He mutters, "Lord, take care of me now," then does what no astronaut has ever done. He jumps. ?Kittinger holds his breath and feels...nothing. Only the disorienting sensation that he is floating. He should be dropping, accelerating at 32 feet per second per second, but evidently he is not. The nylon fabric of his flight suit isn't flapping. He hovers in a bubble of utter silence amplifying the booming of his heart. He looks at his watch. He lies there in the sky. The fear passes through his mind again that he's gone too high, that gravity is too weak here, that somehow his ground crew miscalculated and now he's doomed to drift until his tiny air supply drips out and he succumbs to the beautiful absolute of the cold. He notes the black of space and the transition earthward through shades of violet and blue. Overwhelmed astronauts have spent hours in dreamy near-dementia trying to describe those shades of blue. Wanting to see the stars, Kittinger struggles to flip over. ?"In eerie silence, earth, sky, and departing balloon revolve around me as if I were the center of the universe," he writes later for National Geographic. "I feel like a man in suspended animation." ?He's falling faster than any other human in history. After 16 seconds of free fall, he finally feels a tiny shudder at his back. An experimental, six-foot-wide stabilization chute opens to keep him from going into a lethal flat spin, slowing him imperceptibly if at all. "Chute open," he says into a mic, recorded by the equipment package strapped to his ass. Terminal velocity is an almost meaningless idea in the environment above 63,000 feet, where there is only a few millibars of air pressure and no breathable oxygen. Sky divers falling through the warm, thick troposphere (below 40,000 feet) can count on topping out at about 230 miles per hour. Within seconds, Kittinger hammers through 90,000 feet at a reported 614 mph, a human meteor. In the next several thousand feet, he becomes the first and only human to approach supersonic speeds without the assistance of an engine. (At sea level on a summer day, the speed of sound is around 740 mph. In the cold of the tropopause, it can be as low as 660 mph.) Kittinger sits feet down in the "rocking chair" position, unaware that his descent has transformed the human body from a transceiver of information into a carrier medium moving beyond the invisible limit of sound waves. He never feels the violent rupture in human perception his descent has caused. He's too busy trying to know how to feel in the strange insensible character of space. He says nothing. He finally remembers to breathe. ?A long minute falls away. The air thickens, the chute begins to bite. Below 80,000 feet, he is gripped by a mysterious and prolonged choking sensation, fighting for perhaps 5,000 feet simply to remain conscious. "Can't get my...breath..." he wheezes. Just as mysteriously, the choking suddenly ceases above 70,000 feet. He begins to slow. "Beautiful stability," he says, referring to the experimental multistage parachute he is wearing. "Multistage perfect." By 50,000 feet, friction has reduced his airspeed to only 250 mph. He passKuipers, Dean is the author of 'I Am a Bullet: Scenes from an Accelerating Culture' with ISBN 9780609604090 and ISBN 0609604090.