zhjchv0319 Would he be able replica handbagsto do midair maneuvers in such a bulky contraption? To find out, Mr. Baumgartner and his team recently went to a wind tunnel in Perris, Calif., near Los Angeles, and put the suit through its paces. Team members suited up Mr. Baumgartner, turned on the oxygen in his helmet and attached a pack to his chest containing equipment to record his vital signs, track his position using GPS satellites and heat his helmet¡¯s visor to keep it from fogging.
By the time the suit was inflated to its full pressure of three pounds per square inch, he looked like a robotic version of the Incredible Hulk. As he walked stiffly into the wind tunnel, it was easy to see why astronauts lack a certain grace.
But once Mr. Baumgartner was Replica Louis Vuittoninside, held aloft by air blowing upward at 130 miles per hour, he looked comfortable enough, much to the relief of the engineers. By adjusting his arms and legs, he could shoot up in the tunnel or bring himself down. Most important, with his body angled at 45 degrees to the ground, he could maintain the desired arrowlike stance: head first, arms and legs pointing backward in a V shape called the delta position.
¡°It was difficult, but it worked,¡± Mr. Baumgartner said after emerging from the tunnel. ¡°Now I¡¯m confident I can handle the suit in regular free fall as long as we¡¯re not breaking the speed of sound. But as soon as it goes from subsonic to transonic to supersonic, we don¡¯t know what to expect.¡±
Plenty of planes have designer handbagsbroken the sound barrier, but transonic humans are a mystery, said Art Thompson, the technical project director for the Red Bull Stratos mission, and a former Northrop engineer who worked on the B-2 stealth bomber.
¡°You can run a lot of models, but with the human body you¡¯re not dealing with a hard surface or a ballistic shape,¡± Mr. Thompson said. ¡°You¡¯ve got this rounded bulbous helmet, and the shoulders and the feet sticking out, and everything starts to happen at different times. Parts of your body may be going supersonic while others aren¡¯t, causing flutter waves pulling back and forth among the surfaces.¡±
Could such waves harm the body? Could they create disastrous turbulence?
¡°We just don¡¯t know what Replica Watcheswill happen to Felix and the suit when he goes supersonic,¡± said another Stratos engineer, Mike Todd, who worked on high-altitude suits for the Air Force¡¯s spy-plane pilots with the renowned Skunk Works research division of Lockheed. ¡°Felix could slip right through it, but if half the suit¡¯s supersonic and the other half isn¡¯t, there could be turbulence that knocks him out of control.¡±
Such risks are one Omega replica Watchesreason why Mr. Kittinger¡¯s record has stood for half a century. Air Force and NASA officials have become understandably reluctant to explain potential mishaps to Congressional committees. (To debate the risks and benefits of this project, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
But private adventurers Swiss replica Watches have more freedom to take their own risks. The Stratos medical director, Dr. Jonathan Clark, who formerly oversaw the health of space shuttle crews at NASA, says that the spirit of this project reminds him of stories from the first days of the space age.
¡°This is really risky stuff, putting someone up there in that extreme environment and breaking the sound barrier,¡± Dr. Clark said. ¡°It¡¯s going to be a major technical feat. It¡¯s like early NASA, this heady feeling that we don¡¯t know what we¡¯re up against but we¡¯re going to do everything we can to overcome it.¡±
