Manhigh Pioneer David Simons, 1922-2010
Six weeks before Sputnik 1 ushered in the Space Age, and four years before Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 flight, an adventurous young biomedical researcher named David Simons climbed to the edge of space inside a pressurized capsule, as part of a project called Manhigh. As we wrote in an article publishe…
When he took a break from work and just sat there munching sandwiches and chocolate bars in his tiny capsule 20 miles up, he turned reflective. Later, in his official pilot's report, he wrote: "It seemed right that I should be going toward space, as if that was where I belonged. In this sense I experienced a separation of emotional ties and interests from the earth below and felt an identification with the void of space above."
Simons died on April 5 at his home in Covington, Georgia at the age of 87.