When he got the call, Kittinger knew he had enough oxygen to stay up a little longer, and he wasn’t keen to end the mission just yet. Now at ninety-six thousand feet, he had a view of the Earth that few people had ever seen, its curvature clear against a dark sky. And unlike the rocket plane pilots flying high in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base, he had the luxury of sitting and letting the view wash over him in the silence afforded by his balloon’s lack of propulsion system. The sky took on a hue he had never seen from the Earth. It occurred to him in that moment that he was the first man to spend any length of time in the near-space environment, that he was, in a way, the first man in space.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA