May 1st, 1966:A New Jersey truck driver looks down on the earth from an altitude of 25 miles – the very edge of space, where the smallest mistake could be his last – and prepares to jump.

The world’s second civilian space program is scheduled to launch from the New Mexico desert in late 2007, when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic begins sending amateur astronauts on ballistic rides to the top of the sky. They’ll board a larger version of rocket-powered Spaceship One – the extraordinary vehicle which won the Ansai X-Prize competition in 2004.

That’s right, the Virgin Galactic service will be the second civilian space program. The first civilian space program reached fruition in 1966. Only briefly noted at the time and almost entirely unrecognized since, an archetypical self-made American hero put together a team of citizen volunteers for an assault on the U.S. Air Force’s altitude and free-fall parachuting records.

BLACK SKY AT DAWN will view the current high-tech preparations for civilian spaceflight in the contrasting light of the early-1960s nuts, bolts and baling wire engineering invented for Project Strato-Jump.

View a clip here.

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