Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space

In the 1950s and early 1960s a small fraternity of daring, brilliant men made the first exploratory trips into the upper stratosphere, reaching the edge of outer space in tiny capsules suspended beneath plastic balloons. This book tells the story of these tenacious men as they labored on the cusp of a new age, seeing things that no one had ever seen and experiencing conditions no one was sure they could survive. Mostly U.S. Air Force and Navy officers, among them doctors, physicists, meteor...