Project Manhigh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Project Manhigh along with Project Excelsior was a pre-Space Age military project that took men in balloons to the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The project started in December of 1955 to study the effects of cosmic rays on humans. Three balloon flights to the edge of space were made during the program:
- Manhigh 1 to 29,500 m (96,784 feet), by Captain Joseph W. Kittinger II (1928— ) on June 2, 1957,
- Manhigh 2 to 30,900 m (101,516 feet), by Major David Simons on August 19–20, 1957 for a 32-hour flight,
- Manhigh 3 to 29,900 m (98,097 feet), by Lieutenant Clifton McClure on October 8, 1958.
With the pilot and the scientific payload, the Manhigh 2 gondola had a total mass of 748 kg (1,650 lb). At maximum altitude, the balloon expanded to a diameter of 60 m (200 ft) with a volume of over 85,000 m³ (111,000 cu yd).
A similar project in which a man in a gondola reached an altitude of 15,785 m (51,790 ft) was performed in 1931 by the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard.
[edit] References
- Craig Ryan, The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space, Naval Institute Press, 1995 (ISBN 1-55750-732-5).
[edit] Books
- Touching Space: the story of Project Manhigh by Gregory P. Kennedy (Schiffer Books)
