After depressurising the capsule — the point of no return — Felix perched on its ledge for a few final moments before making his death-defying, multiple record-breaking leap to Earth. He started 99, ft higher than Mount Everest and it took him just minutes to get back to Earth. During his stratospheric skydive, Felix reached a top speed of 1, Felix says he is "officially retired from the daredevil business", and now puts his efforts into his helicopter and public service as a firefighter.
His incredible achievement has led to significant advances in research into the stratosphere and space, as well as spacesuits and safety equipment. Each year our knowledge of once unreachable places keeps on growing. There is no telling where we may go next. Felix Baumgartner: First person to break sound barrier in freefall An unprecedented eight million people went onto YouTube on 14 October to witness the game-changing moment Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner completed a parachute jump from a height of 38, Back to Hall of Fame.
Here is the height-time plot for a jump from k feet and k feet. With both jumps ending at 2, meters. From this model, I get a k jump time of 4 minutes and 14 seconds.
This is fairly close to the official reported value of 4 minutes and 20 seconds. The same jump from k gives a time of almost exactly 4 minutes. Ok - this seems to be a possible explanation. What if I change the ending height for the k jump to 2, feet instead of the reported 8, feet? That would increase the free fall time to 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Just for fun, here is a plot of free fall time vs.
This says what most people would think. Higher starting positions have longer free fall times. That still doesn't give the correct free fall time for Joe Kittinger's record setting free fall time. Even if he did fall to a lower altitude, I don't get the correct time. There is something else that could matter: mass. In Lancaster, the development work proceeded on multiple fronts for several years.
Nearly every component was a one-of-a-kind that had to be designed and fabricated from scratch. There were setbacks of the sort to be expected in any complex engineering project. Red Bull was unhappy with the progress and just wanted to get on with the show. This caused bad feelings, errors in judgment, and purely bureaucratic delays.
But by late , Thompson was able to book the first full operational test of the capsule-and-pressure-suit combination in an altitude chamber at the former Brooks Air Force Base, in San Antonio, Texas. The idea was that, with Baumgartner suited up and sitting inside the capsule, the atmosphere in the chamber would be depressurized to the equivalent of , feet and cooled to degrees Fahrenheit, so that the team could test the weave of the life-support procedures and introduce Baumgartner to an authentically lethal atmospheric environment.
A week before the test, Thompson got a phone call from Baumgartner, who was in California and had driven to Los Angeles International Airport. He was heading home and was in tears. It turned out that privately, over the previous few years, Baumgartner had developed a claustrophobic aversion to pressure suits. Such aversions are not uncommon among would-be astronauts and high-altitude pilots, but they almost always manifest themselves at the start and lead to automatic disqualification.
Baumgartner was different because initially he had been fine with the suit, and had grown claustrophobic only gradually, over time. He hid the struggle until he could hide it no longer. You can fight for an hour, but not for six hours. It was just overwhelming. So I disappeared. I cried like a baby because I had lost my program.
Thompson found a stand-in for the test, and Baumgartner eventually returned to California, but the problem remained: the mere thought of the pressure suit caused him to lose appetite and sleep. Gervais began to work intensively with Baumgartner, using biofeedback and conditioning techniques, training him in language use and thought control, and working extensively—if incrementally—with the pressure suit itself.
After a few weeks Baumgartner was making progress. If you put it on and look in a mirror, you look like a hero, you know? Your suit is made especially for you. It turns you into a superhero. And I walk out with this suit. It protects me. It gives me the right to be there at , feet.
The most important thing is your brain. The project was back on track. In December , at the Roswell airport, the team launched a successful unmanned flight to 91, feet.
The following month, in January , a second unmanned flight went to , feet. In March came the first manned flight: Baumgartner climbed to 71, feet, went through all the exit procedures, and jumped. He reported good control on the way down.
In July he climbed to 97, feet and jumped again. This time he was impressed by the tendency to spin. The experience served to concentrate his mind on the control problems he would face during the jump to come. By the time Baumgartner stood on the step of the capsule at nearly , feet, at noon on October 14, there was little doubt about his survival.
But success meant going supersonic. Plenty of others had gone that fast before outside of the protective enclosures of airplanes, including Weaver doing Mach 3 after the breakup of his Blackbird, and Kittinger himself, who was doing in excess of Mach 1 when he ejected over Vietnam.
But no one before had willingly done it, starting from zero velocity, on-camera, and for bragging rights. Red Bull had seen to it that this time the tree was definitely going to be heard when it fell in the forest, and Baumgartner, for his part, was determined to live up to his side of the deal.
His largest concern was to minimize any spins. The reason was that on his wrist he wore a device—known to the team as the G-Whiz—that would trigger a drogue chute if it measured 3. If the drogue deployed, it would stabilize the free fall but probably also keep Baumgartner from reaching the speed of sound. For this reason he did not leap dramatically from the capsule but made a careful little hop, trying to impart as little rotational movement as possible into the maneuver while pitching forward smoothly into the ideal position: facedown, body at a degree negative incline, arms and legs spread-eagle and slightly bent.
The cameras mounted on the capsule showed Baumgartner rapidly turning into the merest speck far below. Strangely, the sensation for Baumgartner himself was quite the opposite of speed. He was encased in his pressure suit, with only the sound of his own breathing in his ears.
He experienced not the slightest hint of aerodynamic burbling or wind for the longest time and was so far above the ground that his acceleration toward it was invisible to him. Had he slightly overpitched into a partial flip and caught a glimpse upward, his perception would have been very different: he would have seen the balloon seeming to recede dramatically into the sky.
Instead, he held steady, face downward, and floated gently above New Mexico, accelerating fast, saying not a word. Twenty-two seconds into the fall, he dropped through , feet doing miles an hour, actual speed. Had he held in his hand a little flag of Austria, it would at most have gently fluttered. Eight seconds later, he accelerated through miles an hour, and soon afterward he began to spin.
Because of his skill in positioning his body, the motion was benign at first—a slow, complex, oscillating hourglass rotation, five turns clockwise around an axis approximately from head to toe.
Owing to a lack of aerodynamic pressure, it was impossible to counter using standard skydiving techniques. Baumgartner shifted a bit, and through trial and error reversed the rotation into a counterclockwise direction.
The spinning remained slow for the moment, producing minimal G loads. But Baumgartner kept accelerating. Thirty-four seconds into the fall, well after the onset of the spinning, Baumgartner dropped through , feet and went supersonic. Sound is a vibration, a propagating wave. Its speed is a function of temperature. The lower the temperature, the lower the speed. At that altitude on that day, the speed of sound was miles an hour.
As Baumgartner pushed through it in the ultra-thin air, his aerodynamic speed was only about 50 miles an hour. A flag in his hand would have flapped vigorously but would not have been torn from his grasp.
Nonetheless, his body was a projectile now descending at nearly 60, feet a minute. It created a shock wave that was heard as a soft sonic boom on the ground. As he continued to accelerate past Mach 1, his rotation rate increased to nearly one revolution per second. Fifty seconds into the jump, Baumgartner was at 91, feet. He was falling at miles an hour, or Mach 1. It would be his peak. He had reached his maximum aerodynamic speed, approximately miles an hour—slightly higher than the average terminal velocity at any altitude for a skydiver in a classic spread-eagled pose.
From that point on, the atmospheric drag would keep him from going any faster aerodynamically, with the effect that his true speed would gradually slow.
Indeed, 14 seconds later, at 75, feet, he went subsonic. He was still spinning fast but at lower true speeds through thicker air. He was cool under the pressure—one of the acquired traits from his BASE-jumping years. Working systematically, he found a way to stop the spin and maintain control.
From there to the ground his problems were over. At 35, feet the pressure suit automatically deflated, increasing his mobility. After four minutes and 19 seconds of free fall and a drop of , feet, Baumgartner deployed his parachute. He opened his visor to bleed out all remaining oxygen, moved his chest pack to the side for increased visibility, spotted the landing zone from the smoke flare dropped by a recovery helicopter, and touched down gently into an easterly breeze.
He dropped to his knees and pumped his arms in a gesture of victory and relief. Once freed, he removed his helmet, rubbed his hair, and pumped his arms again.
He then climbed into a helicopter and was flown to the launch point in Roswell, where he and Kittinger embraced. Dare-devil skydiver seeks record. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Highlights from Felix Baumgartner's leap into the record books. Watch video footage taken from a camera mounted on Felix Baumgartner's chest as he fell to earth. The Austrian first began to discuss seriously the idea of a record breaking jump in Kittinger L was the only person Baumgartner wanted to hear on the radio during the mission.
The giant helium balloon carrying Baumgartner's capsule was released early morning local time in Roswell. Labels Off On. Heated sun visor. High altitude balloon: expands with altitude. Balloon made of plastic film 0. Frame attaches capsule to balloon. View comments. Published 14 October Published 15 October
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