Scared of heights? (Image courtesy USAF)

It doesn’t get much more mind-blowing than this. By the late 1950s, the U.S. Air Force needed to upgrade their flight crew ejection technology to meet the needs of increasingly high-speed and high-altitude aircraft. So along came Project Excelsior, which culminated in Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr.’s record-setting skydive from an altitude of nearly 20 miles above the Earth’s surface.

See, Air Force technician Francis Beaupre had a radical new parachute system called the Beaupre Multi-Stage Parachute. It featured a stabilizer parachute to prevent uncontrolled spinning and tumbling at high altitudes as well as a timing and altitude system to deploy the main chutes. But how were they to test such a system?

The answer, devised by the staff at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was to send Kittinger up in a high-altitude gondola for the mother of all skydives. In fact, they sent him up for THREE of these incredible freefalls. Each ascent required roughly 3 million cubic feet (84,950 cubic meters) of helium. Here’s how the dives went down:

Excelsior I: Kittinger jumped from an altitude of 76,400-feet on Nov. 16, 1959.

Excelsior II: Kittinger jumped from an altitude of 74,700 feet on Dec. 11, 1959.

Excelsior III: This is the big one. On Aug. 16, 1960, Kittinger soared up to an altitude of 102,800 feet — that’s roughly 19.5 (31.33 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth. He fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, reaching a maximum speed of 614 miles (988 kilometers) per hour before the main chute opened at 17,500 feet (5,334 meters). Total descent time: 13 minutes, 45 seconds. He scored three records: highest parachute jump, longest parachute free fall and first person to exceed the speed of sound without an aircraft or space vehicle.

The mission was a success, Kittinger went down in the record books and the rest of us were left with this amazing footage. The top video is Boards of Canada‘s excellent “Dayvan Cowboy” music video, which uses footage from the famous jump for the first two minutes or so. The second video shows a little more of the Excelsior footage. You can see a replica of the Excelsior gondola at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s U.S. Air Force Museum in Ohio.

So think about that as you watch balls drop this New Year’s Eve.

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