zhjchv0325 Ordinarily, Felix Baumgartner would not need a lot of practice in the science of falling.
He has jumped off two replica handbagsof the tallest buildings in the world, as well as the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro (a 95-foot leap for which he claimed a low-altitude record for parachuting). He has sky-dived across the English Channel. He once plunged into the black void of a 623-foot-deep cave, which he formerly considered the most difficult jump of his career.
But now Fearless Felix, as his fans call him, has something more difficult on the agenda: jumping from a helium balloon in the stratosphere at least 120,000 feet above Earth. Within about half a minute, he figures, he would be going 690 miles per hour and become the first skydiver to break the speed of sound. After a free fall lasting five and a half minutes, his parachute would open and land him about 23 miles below the balloon.
At least, that’s the Replica Louis Vuitton plan, although no one really knows what the shock wave will do to his body as it exceeds the speed of sound. The jump, expected sometime this year, would break one of the most venerable aerospace records. For half a century, no one has surpassed (one person died trying) the altitude record set by Joe Kittinger as part of an Air Force program called Project Excelsior.
In 1960, Mr. Kittinger, then a 32-year-old Air Force pilot, jumped from a balloon 102,800 feet above the New Mexico desert. Today, at 81, Mr. Kittinger is a retired colonel and part of the Red Bull Stratos team working on Mr. Baumgartner’s jump, which is being financed by the energy-drink company.
“For 50 years,” Mr. Kittinger Replica Watchessaid, “I’ve gotten phone calls from all over the world, people wanting to break my record — one a month, sometimes two a month. But I stayed away from them because they didn’t have any idea what the challenge was. What attracted me to Red Bull was their methodological approach to safety and to providing scientific benefits.”
More than three dozen veterans of NASA, the Air Force and the aerospace industry have been working for three years to plan the jump, build a balloon and pressurized capsule, and customize an astronaut’s suit for Mr. Baumgartner. Besides aiming at records, they’re doing physiological research and developing procedures for future astronauts to survive a loss of cabin pressure or an emergency bailout in the stratosphere.
One of the chief concerns has been to avoid the problem that almost killed Mr. Kittinger during Project Excelsior. He was supposed to be stabilized during his fall by a small drogue parachute, but on one training jump in 1959 it did not open because the cord got tangled around his neck.
As a result, Mr. Kittinger’s body went into a spin that reached 120 revolutions per minute as he plummeted more than 60,000 feet. He blacked out and regained consciousness only after his reserve parachute opened automatically about a mile above the ground. When he came to, he later wrote, he first assumed he must have died, but then he spotted the parachute’s canopy above him and made a sudden realization: “I am impossibly, wonderfully alive.”
Mr. Baumgartner hopes to remain stable and conscious throughout his longer fall without relying on a drogue parachute. He plans to avoid spinning by adjusting the angle of his body and keeping his arms at his side.
This stabilizing technique would ordinarily be fairly easy for an expert like Mr. Baumgartner, 41, a former paratrooper in the Austrian Special Forces and a veteran of more than 2,500 jumps from planes, cliffs and assorted landmarks. But to survive the stratosphere’s near vacuum and frigid temperatures, he will need a sealed helmet and a pressurized suit.
