Higher
still

At the cruising altitude of airliners the sky is already a deep blue, and high in the stratosphere at midday it is almost black. In 1935 the military engineer Emilio Herrera, a member of the very first class to train at Cuatro Vientos, designed a pressure suit for ascending into the stratosphere in an open-gondola balloon. The flight was planned for 1936, but the war prevented it. Today his suit is regarded as one of the forerunners of the spacesuit, and since 2022 the Spanish Air Force has been known as the Air and Space Force