One of my favourite bands is Scottish electronic duo `boards of Canada`they have took off for me where `tangerine dream` stopped in the 90s,a band i still listen to a lot, on youtube and i recently came across a BOC video for one of there best songs `Dayvan cowboy` which brought to light something i never knew happened.., watch the start of this amazing bit of film clip is from `Project Excelsior`...
On august 16th 1960 Joesph Kittenger of the USAF stepped off a balloon gondola in the stratosphere on the edge of space at 102,800ft. Just think about that for a minute..., that's like nearly 40 kilometres/24 miles up...
Free falling for 4 1/2 minutes, to open his main chute at 17,500 ft, and setting a highest ever free fall and parachute jump. which has still remained unchallenged to this day...
It was part of a 3 jump experiment to see how the human body could cope with a high altitude (edge of space) parachute.This was of course because of the approaching cold war and the high altitude U2 spy planes being developed. The USAF needed a parachute system which would work in a near airless environment in the case of an emergency.
A 2 stage parachute system was successfully tried out in Project Excelsior with Joseph kittenger being the living subject. Remember humans had only parachuted from around 60,000 feet so he was going where `no man had been before`.
Any failure with his suit that weighed his own weight would have resulted in instant death.
There was no computers then that could predict the results, only boffins doing maths with pen and pencil.
A pretty hardcore experiment i think, which still remains unbeaten today. Why didn't we learn about stuff like this at school?,here's alot of info on project excelsior
and a documentary film of the 3 jumps made...
i think the BOC song really fits the film,a big song for a big sky-check out the curvature of the earth!!, amazing...
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