I was lucky to have been online right when the space jump was about to happen, and a friend skyped me and told me to go to a link and watch something RIGHT NOW. So I got to watch it live.


https://gizmodo.com/5951621/watch-the-video-of-the-space-jump-here


It was really scary! This guy, Felix Baumgartner, was stepping out of little spacepod-thing that was floating in one spot so high it was in the stratosphere -- and jumping to earth. A skydive from what is almost outer space. The sky is even dark, and if you were able to look up from where he was, maybe you'd see stars although this was afternoon. He jumped out at 24 miles above Earth.

The spacepod had been lifted to that height by a huge, huge balloon that took several hours to rise as high in the atmosphere as they wanted. The helium in it expanded as it went higher, so the balloon kept getting bigger.

For the first 30 seconds, the jumper is falling almost without any friction, since there's almost no air to speak of, and he is falling about as fast as a commercial airliner usually flies. Faster, in fact. But without the wind resistance, he won't have any real sense of speed -- as he said afterward -- and he starts to slow down as he falls since the air gets thicker.

They calculated that he actually reached Mach 1. He broke the speed of sound during those first 30 seconds of falling.



It's about 65 below zero up there, and he's not exactly going as fast as the space shuttle, so he won't feel any heat from the friction.

Back at the control station -- which resembles NASA's Mission Control -- the old guy on the headset you see talking to Felix Baumgartner is the very person who actually holds the previous record for longest skydive freefall, which he did about 50 years ago. But his jump was from a lower altitude. Felix Baumgartner didn't beat the length of time the old guy (Joe Kittinger) set in 1960 for freefall. But he beat all records for altitude, of course.

The entire jump and landing is now back up in video on Gizmodo, except they stuck a commercial in the middle. Earlier in the day all you'd see were short videos, portions of the whole thing.

I read that these men have done many, many, many dives of all sorts and are basically astronauts as far as training. But when he said his visor was fogged up -- a couple of minutes after he'd jumped out already -- I was scared, wondering how he can tell his altitude, in order to open the chute at the right time, or aim it, or anything??

It turns out that was actually an almost-abort-moment of the jump. If his visor hadn't cleared enough, he would have had to cut the freefall part of his dive short, and open the parachute very early.

But he didn't need to, obviously…. and his landing was so perfect, even graceful.

What I'd love to know is where all the cameras were -- that allowed us to see him falling the entire time.

Oh, and notice that Red Bull is the sponsor of this. They manage to get their name on spectacular flying and diving events.


Some other crazy people doing impressive things:
Base jumper Jeb Corliss in bat-like wingsuit:



Other guys flying that gorge. Notice the Red Bull logo on the parachute.