The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space
Craig Ryan
Format: Hardcover, 294pp.
ISBN: 1557507325
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Pub. Date: May  1995

This is an "accounting of the U.S. efforts at manned stratospheric ballooning between World War II and the first manned spaceflights of Project Mercury--missions that included . . . scientific and would-be record-setting flights, . . . high-altitude parachute jumps and airborne telescopic surveys.