Falling back to earth, alone

In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger flew 30km straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon. This very nearly made him the first man in space.
He then jumped.


Kittinger free-fell for over twenty kilometers – at which point he was moving so fast he broke the sound barrier.


He had all but left the earth's atmosphere; the sky around him was pitch black; he could see the outlines of entire continents; and the haiku-like abstraction of his available reference points – earth, balloon, space – made it impossible to tell if he was really falling.
Luckily, there's a film.