Would you jump from the edge of space? #shorts #history

Do you want to know what it would look like if you were somehow able to jump out of a plane flying near the edge of space? Because this, this is what it would look like. This is Joe Kittinger and his famous Project Excelsior jump. In 1960 he jumped from a capsule lifted by balloon to 102,800 feet just to test a new kind of parachute. So the issue was in the 1950s planes were starting to fly higher and faster and that meant they were a lot more dangerous for the pilots. The issue was bailing out. Parachutes inflate because air molecules fill them up. So if you have to bail out of a plane and you're above the atmosphere, there's nothing to fill up that parachute. You are just gonna fall. The U.S. Air Force knew this was a problem in the late 1950s so started figuring out how to keep their pilots alive if they ever did have to bail out of a high altitude aircraft. The first thing they did was figure out what would actually happen to a human body falling from altitude. So they dropped a dummy and this is what it looks like. They found that a human body would naturally fall in a prone position but spinning like you're rolling down a hill, rotating up to 465 times per minute. At that point you're gonna start blacking out. You're not going to be able to just wait until you hit a lower altitude to deploy your parachute. So an engineer named Francis Beaupre figured out a way to do it with sequentially releasing parachutes. First was a small pilot parachute that they could pull out at high altitude. That would then bring out a stabilizing parachute that was six feet in diameter and that would be able to inflate a little bit lower down. Once the pilot was in thick enough air to inflate a full-size parachute, the main parachute would deploy. This was the system Joe Kintger tested on August 16th of 1960 and it worked. He was fine and he got to jump from the edge of space and that is so cool.