New Releases by Craig Ryan

The untold story of an eccentric, scientific visionary whose death-defying research has saved millions of lives. Sixty years ago, cars and airplanes were still deathtraps waiting to happen. Today, both are safer than ever, thanks in part to one pioneering air force doctor’s research on seatbelts and ejection seats. The exploits of John Paul Stapp (1910–1999) come to thrilling life in this biography of a Renaissance man who was once blasted—faster than a .45 caliber bullet—across the desert in his Sonic Wind rocket sled, only to be slammed to a stop in barely a second. The experiment put him on the cover of Time magazine and allowed his swashbuckling team to gather the data needed to revolutionize automobile and aircraft design. But Stapp didn’t stop there. From the legendary high-altitude balloon tests that ensued to the ferocious battles for car safety legislation, Craig Ryan’s book is as much a history of America’s transition into the Jet Age as it is a biography of the man who got us there safely.

Locked in a desperate Cold War race against the Soviets to find out if humans could survive in space and live through a free fall from space vehicles, the Pentagon gave civilian adventurer Nick Piantanida’s Project Strato-Jump little notice until May Day, 1966. Operating in the shadows of well-funded, high-visibility Air Force and Navy projects, the former truck driver and pet store owner set a new world record for manned balloon altitude. Rising more than 23 miles over the South Dakota prairie, Piantanida nearly perished trying to set the world record for the highest free fall parachute jump from that height. On his next attempt, he would not be so lucky. Part harrowing adventure story, part space history, part psychological portrait of an extraordinary risk-taker, this story fascinates and intrigues the armchair adventurer in all of us.

A few years after his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp in 1973, Colonel Joseph Kittinger retired from the Air Force. Restless and unchallenged, he turned to ballooning, a lifelong passion as well as a constant diversion for his imagination during his imprisonment. His primary goal was a solitary circumnavigation of the globe, and in its pursuit he set several ballooning distance records, including the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1984. But the aeronautical feats that first made him an American hero had occurred a quarter of a century earlier. By the time Kitting.

Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, before liquid-fuel rockets had launched us full-sail onto what John Kennedy would call the "new ocean", a small fraternity of daring, brilliant men made the first exploratory trips into the upper stratosphere to the edge of outer space in tiny capsules suspended beneath plastic balloons. They saw things no one had ever seen, and they experienced conditions no one was sure they could survive. This book tells the story of these brave and tenacious men as they labored on the cusp of a new age. The author captures the drama of their spectacular achievements and those of many of the other space pioneers who made America''s stratospheric balloon programs possible. Their now largely forgotten programs supplied many systems and processes adopted by NASA. Unfortunately, some of the valuable lessons they brought back from the edge of space were ignored - in at least one case, with disastrous consequences. Craig Ryan''s argument is compelling for the inclusion of these men''s achievements in the broad history of space exploration and astronautics. In their day, before Gagarin and Glenn and American flags on the Sea of Tranquillity, these pre-astronauts were the space program.