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At the Aero Medical Lab of the Air Materiel Command in Dayton, Dr. Stapp found his future. He had a few months to go before taking off his uniform, and he asked to see "something interesting." He saw it. Jet planes were racing into areas that doctors had seldom bothered with before; jet pilots were flying into a skyful of trouble. Aviation medicine was faced with new and fascinating problems, and doctors were desperately trying to find the answers. Just 17 miles toward the stars, space, the new frontier, was suddenly within reach. All the resources of science were being thrown into a concentrated effort to keep the first explorers alive.
"Watta Whoomp!" Flight surgeons were doing their research while strapped in diving planes, sitting anxiously in decompression chambers, spinning in huge centrifuges. Sir Frederick Banting, the moody Canadian co-discoverer of insulin, had subjected himself to blackout forces in fast-maneuvering aircraft while developing a g-suit for the R.A.F., and he was killed in a crash while flying to England for a demonstration. In 1943 famed Flight Surgeon William Randolph Lovelace II had made a parachute jump from a record-breaking altitude (40,000 ft.), to prove that oxygen bail-out bottles were effective in high-altitude jumps.
It was not enough that engineers were learning how to pressurize cabins and build new oxygen systems to keep men alive when their planes climbed into the stratosphere. What would happen when these synthetic atmospheres failed, when pilots had to hit the silk? All that the U.S. Air Force knew about ejection seats, for example, was contained in a captured German handbook. The only American to try such a bailout (from a P-61 Black Widow flying at 285 m.p.h. at 15,000 ft.) had hardly been a mine of information. His entire report: "Jeez, watta whoomp!"
Crusade in Uniform. Dr. Stapp's first assignment in aeromedical research: to field-test a liquid-oxygen emergency breathing system. For good measure, he was also to recommend preventive measures for high-altitude bends, chokes, gas pains and dehydration. He spent 64½ hours in the air, at altitudes up to 45,000 ft. For the first time he visited the frigid stratosphere, where, he remembers, "the landscape flattens out into geography, where the stars cease to twinkle, where shadows are darker and sunlight more burning, where at dusk it somehow looks as if a solar eclipse is about to begin." Stapp's next job: the first rocket-sled research program, at Edwards (then Muroc) Air Force Base on the Mojave desert in California. He had finished his reserve officer's hitch, but one day he happened to attend a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. "Scientists in uniform," he recalls, "were treated like debris by their civilian colleagues." The scorn of the "mental Cadillac fleet" so irritated Stapp that he decided to stay in service.
"I didn't know it at the time," says he, "but I had stumbled into a crusade for the prevention of needless deaths."