The first thing that impresses anyone coming into close contact with the man-in-space program is the massive amount of research that preceded America's first space flight in 1961. One such experiment was Project Man-High.

The huge plastic balloon which carried Lt. Col. David G. Simons to a record altitude of 102,000 feet rises from the open-pit iron mine in northern Minnesota where it was launched.

Lt. Col. Simons, youngest of the pioneering Strughold-Stapp-Simons trio, was thirty-six when he squeezed into a sealed gondola of a 350-foot-tall balloon and was lifted to a maximum of 102,000 feet - over nineteen miles - into the stratosphere. This was Project Man-High and for thirty-two hours the brave doctor cruised perilously above at least ninety-six per cent of the earth's atmosphere, where air pressure is so low his blood vessels would have burst in seconds if his cabin had been penetrated.

To test further the feared, largely unknown cosmic rays - one of the many projects Doctor Simons carried out in Man-High - experts have even put fungi into balloons. Other early experiments involved dogs, white mice, fruit flies, hamsters and monkeys, all sent skyward in balloons and rockets. The most highly publicized biosatellite (life-carrying capsule), before United States and Russian spacemen made their first manned trips, was Sputnik II and its passenger dog, Laika. Laika assured us that organisms could survive the shock of blast-off. But Laika wasn't the first, either. The fact is that the U.S. Air Force started space-probing tests as far back as 1949, by sending Philippine macaque monkeys up in V-2 and Aerobee rockets. They parachuted to earth and one healthy specimen lived quite comfortably for years at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C.

source: Man in Space, 1969

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