Suicide at 73,000 Ft.

Rated as a "physiological technician," Specialist 3rd Class Walter M. Moore from Anniston, Ala., was assigned to the Air Force team operating the high-altitude chamber at Davis Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Ariz. Each day Moore, 19, and five other jet-age airmen, like similar crews at 40 other bases, carefully nursed in-training plane crews on simulated flights into thin-air altitudes. A straight-A student in off-duty courses at the University of Arizona, Specialist Moore soon learned on his Air Force duty how altitude affects the human body. Without oxygen a man blacks out above 20,000 ft., suffers from expanding intestinal gas around 25,000, feels intolerable heart strain even with a high-pressure oxygen mask at 50,000, dies instantly from boiling blood (bubbling off gas like soda water) at 63,000 ft. if not pressurized inside a space suit.

Late one night last week, Moore went alone to the high-altitude chamber. On the control panel outside the 10-ft.-by-30-ft. heavy steel tank, he set the altitude indicator at 73,000 ft., a near vacuum just below the limit of the chamber's air seals. Not in space suit, but holding an oxygen mask, he let himself into the chamber and waited for the air pumps to lower the pressure, take him "up" past the blackout stage, on beyond the sure-death line to 73,000 ft. His body, as if taken by rocket to the edge of space, expanded in the vacuumlike atmosphere.

Next morning the other airmen of his crew, coming on duty for a routine day's work, found the body on the chamber floor. His suicide note asked them not to condemn him for using the chamber to kill himself; if he told his motive, the Air Force wasn't telling. Moore became the fourth airman in 17 years, recall air medical officers at other bases, to seek death deliberately at a simulated height, perhaps the first man in history killed above 63,000 ft. by boiling blood.

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