1. On May 4,1961, Prather drowned during the helicopter transfer after the landing of the Strato-Lab V balloon flight, which set an altitude record for manned balloon flight which stood until 2012.
10 Facts About Victor Prather
1. 2.
Victor Prather attended Tufts College in 1943, and became part of the V-12 program stationed in Honolulu, Hawaii from 1943 to 1945.
3.
Victor Prather returned to Tufts at the end of WWII and attended Tufts University School of Medicine, graduating there in 1952.
4.
In 1954, Victor Prather rejoined the United States Navy in the Navy Medical Corps.
5.
Victor Prather was stationed in Pensacola and then transferred to San Diego, CA.
6.
Victor Prather was stationed as a medical doctor aboard the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La until 1957, when he was assigned to the US Naval Air Station in Port Lyautey, Morocco as Flight Surgeon for VR-24.
7.
In 1959, Victor Prather was reassigned to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.
8.
In 1960, Victor Prather was transferred to Project RAM, a government program to test prototype space suits, at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
9.
Victor Prather was commissioned to test how the suits worked underwater, and later commissioned to see how the suits would function at extremely high altitudes.
10.
Commander Ross invited Victor Prather to go first, but he declined.