Not sailing related at all but check this out http://www.redbullstratos.com

He will be jumping live around 1pm EST

is that higher than Col. Kittenger's jump? I met the guy once - he's about as unassuming as a guy could get. I think he lived in Jupiter, FL, for a while.

National Geographic did a story on Kittenger. His hobby is hot air balloning!

Kittenger was a little over 102k feet. This jump is planned for 120k feet.

Yes this will break four records. Just got aborted for the day due to high winds.


Couldn't tell you what 4 records other than the highest jump. Might also be the record for speed unaided, will break the speed of sound.

They tout this as "scientific" yet I'm struggling with what we're learning...perhaps we're learning how to bail out astronauts at high altitude (sarcastic).

How to sell caffeine in space? If I was doing the jumping I don't think I'd need a stimulate. Imodium maybe..probably..definitely.

There was mention of this will also be testing out new space outfits for NASA

They actually said that's part of their research.(no sarcasm)
The guy heading up the research lost his wife in one of the shuttle disasters.

They will also test if Redbull still tastes gross at high altitudes.

Cool project though, no-one knows what will happen to him when he freefalls at mach 1.

OK - fair enough...but I think the thought of an astronaut punching out of a rocket doing Mach 5000, let alone having enough warning to do so, is silly...but then again, if you push off from the space station at JUST the right angle....

convenient excuse to sell product and look good doing it.

Am I sounding old or what?

not old, just jealous

Rent the movie Dark Star. The pilot surfs into the atmosphere of a planet.

Watch out for Beach Ball and Thermostellar Bomb #20.

Yeah, call a spade a spade. It's a record attemt sponsored by a non-space affiliated group

I don't think space suits helped, or would have helped either Challenger, Colombia, Apollo 13, or AS-204. But I'm not current on all my space disasters...

Could you develop a drogue chute to make a sub-orbital fall survivable? Back in the SR-71 and U-2 days this could have been a valid question for pilot safety. Now, I think the only craft in that zone would be hypersonic ram-jet planes (at Mach 7+) or spacecraft leaving/entering the atmosphere (at Mach "HOLY SH&T")

Doesn't matter who is sponsoring it, Felix Baumgartner has balls of titanium.

The Columbia disaster might have been survivable if the crew elected to eject/had time to do so. Big question mark there. In most situations the speed is too fast, that is accurate. Even hypothetical hypersonic vehicles are too fast.

Where this technology might come in handy are for sub-orbital/low speed re-entries. An example would be Scaled Composites Spaceship One and SpaceshipTwo, and the white knight launch vehicle that routinely exceeds 50,000 feet. Now, the changes of an average paying passenger on a spaceshiptwo flight being capable of performing a Felix style jump is probably pretty low, but maybe the pilots will make it out alive...

The differences between the speed of jumping out of a balloon and a sub-orbital plane are almost infinite. That planes have to move so fast to get any lift out of their wings at that altitude, I'm not sure you can slow something down enough to facilitate getting out of it until it reaches denser air. By that time, there probably won't be much left of it. You could make some sort of capsule or pod, but then you might as well just equip it with a chute and splash it down like the rocket pods.

But, in the less dense air their would not be nearly the friction as an equivalent speed at sea level. Unless, we are referring to Mach at the real Mach speed at the given altitude, which is a different speed than sea level.

Max Q is really the problem. Felix is jumping at probably the best point-much higher and you have to worry about re-entry trajectories. Jumping out of a moving spacecraft isn't trivial either, but that depends on the altitude and the airspeed-an escape pod probably makes more real-world sense.

Really the Apollo guys knew what they were doing when they went for the capsule design. Carrying wings into space is a bit silly, but the Air Force seems to think splashing down in the ocean is a bad idea too.

interesting hypothesis. Let's just presume they had and extra 30 seconds warning of impending doom. How would you theorize a survivable escape sequence?

I'm not trying to be sarcastic (really)

As for the 50,000 HALO jumping, I think the military's already equipped for that. They do 34,000 ft jumps for newbies now...

Most people don't know this as the reports became public only in the last couple of years, but during the Challenger disaster only two of the seven astronauts died during the explosion. Anyone want to take a guess what the others died from? One suffocated and four died upon impact with Earth.
Most people also never took notice that astronauts starting wearing parachutes during shuttle launches. What old video footage and you will see that they all were them after the Challenger disaster, but not before. The shuttles were also fitted with an escape system to allow the crew to get out at mach insanity without being clipped by a delta wing.
My point is had this stuff been done earlier there might be five more astronauts alive today and it is theoretically possible to survive parachuting from the shuttle.