The Man Who Jumped From the Edge of Space

On August 16, 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger travelled to the edge of space in a large helium balloon—and then jumped. His ascent and parachute jump of over 102,000 feet became a world record that held until 2012 when an adventurer made a slightly higher jump.

The photograph, taken by automatic cameras as the 32-year-old Kittinger stepped out of his balloon and began his astonishing skydive back to Earth, is now iconic. At the time, however, the death-defying jump was carried out in near secrecy at the beginning of America’s Space Race with the Soviet Union. NASA had only around two years, and Kittinger was a test subject for the Air Force to assess human endurance in near-space environments. This crucial data could only be obtained by sending someone to the edge of space.

“Many of the earliest scientists and medical practitioners in human history not only came up with experiments but experimented on themselves,” aerospace historian Francis French says. He identifies Kittinger as a key figure among early space researchers, who included the U.S. Air Force Colonel John P. Stapp—at one time the world’s fastest man, a record he achieved on a rocket sled in 1954—and Major David G. Simons, a physician and high-altitude balloonist.

“We see with these aerospace pioneers the last gasp of that practice: Kittinger, Stapp and Simons pushed human understanding of what the body could endure but did it personally,” French says.

In addition to providing data on humans in spaceflight, Kittinger was testing a new emergency device to automatically deploy his parachute. Versions of the same design remain in the ejection seats of many combat aircraft today. The Air Force released a newsreel of Kittinger’s jump a few days later, when they had recovered the balloon and developed the film in its cameras. But many of the details remained classified for years.

It is now known that Kittinger (who was wearing a “partial” pressure suit, as used by high-altitude pilots) stepped out of the unpressurized gondola of his helium balloon at an altitude of 102,800 feet (about 20 miles high) and fell for more than four and a half minutes before he deployed his parachute at an altitude of around 18,000 feet. He fell faster than anyone before in history and reached a top speed of 614 miles an hour on the way down—more than 90 percent of the speed of sound. The denser atmosphere nearer the ground slowed his fall, and he deployed his parachute safely.

French compares Kittinger to the test pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong, who in July 1969 became the first person to walk on the moon. “These were not things to be brute-forced though in a daredevil-like way,” he says. “These were issues to be approached methodically, step by step, understanding where things went wrong, trying again.” And Kittinger was a true pioneer, treating the edge of space as something “not to conquer or overcome, but to understand,” French says.

Kittinger’s jump was unmatched for more than 50 years. In 2012, the Austrian adventurer Felix Baumgartner set a higher record of 127,852 feet. With Kittinger acting as an advisor for the attempt, Baumgartner jumped from a pressurized balloon gondola but did so without a drogue chute to stabilize him. As a result, he began a rapid flat spin and almost blacked out. The crisis lasted 60 long seconds, before he stabilized his fall. As he plummeted towards Earth, he became the first person to bodily exceed the speed of sound on the way down. (Baumgartner died in a paragliding accident in July 2025.)

In 2014, an even higher record was set by the American Alan Eustace, a computer scientist who had been a senior vice president at Google. Eustace jumped from a height of 135,889 feet—a record that still stands. Kittinger wasn’t an advisor that time, but Eustace met him soon after. The two men, both from the very rare brotherhood of people who have jumped from the edge of space, became and remained good friends until Kittinger's death in 2022 at the age of 94.

Eustace recalls that Kittinger was “kind and humble… very approachable, and very smart.” He’d been a test pilot for the Air Force and, before that, had flown fighter jets in Vietnam. Kittinger retired from the Air Force as a colonel. “He must have told me 1,000 stories… he was just an amazing person,” Eustace says.

Kittinger pursued his highest jump even after almost dying on an earlier jump. In that near-fatal jump, Kittinger’s drogue came out early and wrapped around his neck. “He went unconscious but woke up under his parachute, because the automatic opening device worked that time,” Eustace says. But brush with death didn’t dissuade him.

“One of the cool things about Joe,” Eustace says, “is that he did the [highest] jump after an earlier jump almost killed him.”