Fifty-two years ago, Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger, assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at the time, reached the edge of the atmosphere, a realm where sky meets space, jumped out of an open-air balloon gondola and set a free fall record 102,800 feet above the New Mexico desert.

When Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner skydived from a record 128,100 feet and broke the sound barrier Sunday over New Mexico, Kittinger was there again, making history. He was an advisor and the voice of mission control, speaking to the man who would break his high jump altitude milestone.

“I’m the only person that will know what Felix is feeling when he jumps off that step,” Kittinger said in an interview with Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos team that sponsored the adventure.

As Baumgartner headed for the upper reaches of the atmosphere, Kittinger had reassurance to the protege: “Our guardian angle will take care of you,” he said, the Associated Press reported.

The road to Kittinger’s historic skydive from the heavens, part of the Air Force’s Project Excelsior, began in Dayton at Wright-Patterson. The fighter pilot was assigned to aerospace medical research. At Wright Field, technicians assembled the gondola he rode to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and Wright Field technician Francis Beaupre designed the three-parachute system that returned Kittinger safely to earth Aug. 16, 1960.

“The most dangerous (challenge) was he was going to a place literally nobody had been before,” said Jeff Underwood, historian at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Kittinger helped oversee the construction of a replica of the balloon gondola at the museum’s exhibit commemorating his jump.

Like Baumgartner, Kittinger had two prior high altitude skydives above the New Mexico desert before the final, historic feat.

Kittinger’s flight wasn’t a stunt half a century ago, but had “real scientific reasons,” Underwood said.

In 1960, Kittinger wore the same, slightly pressurized flight suit pilots in high-altitude aircraft wore.

“They were more than just testing the parachute,” Underwood said. “They were also doing scientific studies of altitude.”

The Air Force needed to push the limits of the human envelope in flight to determine how well the suits stood up to the rigors of ejecting at high altitude, Underwood said. The point was brought home in World War II when B-29 Superfortress crewmen bailed out of the propeller-driven bombers over Japan and entered flat spins or lost consciousness and died because of the high altitudes they were jumping out of the aircraft.

During the balloon ascent, the pressure blew out in Kittinger’s right glove, causing his hand to be exposed to extreme cold of 94 degrees below zero and the hyper-thin atmosphere.

“It was extremely dangerous, what he did, to press on with that jump,” Underwood said. “That took an amount of courage that I don’t know that most people have.”

When Kittinger stepped out of the gondola, he approached the speed of sound reaching 614 mph on his return to Earth from more than 19 miles in the sky.

A stabilizing parachute popped out to prevent the jumper from entering an uncontrollable flat spin. The main 28-foot-long parachute deployed at 17,500 feet on the minutes-long descent to terra firma.

Underwood said Kittinger, a former Vietnam POW who now lives in Florida, didn’t risk his life for a milestone.

“I don’t think it was about the record,” Underwood said. “It was about he had a job to do and his job was to save future airmen.”

After Kittinger left the Air Force, the retired colonel set other aviation milestones: A distance record traveled in a gas balloon and another for a solo balloon flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

“Man’s always inquisitive,” Kittinger said in an interview with Red Bull Stratos. “Man always wants to go higher, faster, lower, deeper. … We always like to push the envelope.”