"The record is currently held by Col. Joe Kittinger, who in 1960 jumped from 102,800 feet as part of a U.S. Air Force mission. On this attempt, 52 years later, Kittinger is a consultant and mentor.
He has also been giving Baumgartner advice on what to expect. For example, he described what it feels like to fall through space when there is so little air: "There's no way you can tell how fast you're going, because there's no visual cues."
But Kittinger rejects any suggestion that he is jealous that Baumgartner is poised to beat his record.
"Oh no. I'm delighted," he told CNN recently. "He's advancing science, and he'll do a great job."
As others have mentioned, Kittinger isn't "jealous" - in fact, he doesn't look at what he did as setting a "record," per se.
Kittinger's jumps were done as part of Project Manhigh and Project Excelsior, two U.S. military projects launched in the late 1950's (before the Gemini space program) to test whether a bailout system for astronauts could work. Kittinger had made a few military skydives, but it was an important fact that he wasn't a skydiver (as none of the Gemini astronauts would be skydivers, and know how to fly their bodies in freefall). The bailout system they were building had to be usable by even inexperienced pilots.
So Joe has often said he wasn't going up to set a record - and he hates it when people focus on that. He was just doing his job, trying to make sure the astronauts had a safe out on their way to set history. (In his view, it was only an coincidence that he set history himself along the way).
Kittenger was just pushing the envelop as a test pilot. The fact that he survived shows how uncrazy his approach was. When I was growing up in Orlando, he was best known locally as the skywriter for Rosey O' Grady's - he would go up just about every afternoon during tourist season.
