![]() ![]() “When he looks up he’ll see blackness and possibly stars.” “The view will be spectacular” Mabee said. It will be like a skydive that lasts longer wearing a space suit,” Mabee said.īaumgartner, however, will see a vista few people have ever seen before. So just how complicated is the attempt? What Baumgartner is going to do is challenging from a technical perspective, said Adam Mabee, chief instructor and president of the Parachute School of Toronto. In the 1990s, he began parachuting from a fixed object or landform. In 1988 he began performing skydiving exhibitions for Red Bull. In 2003, he became the first man to skydive across the English Channel, using carbon wings attached to his body.īorn in 1969, he began skydiving at 16. He has jumped off the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and he has base jumped – or parachuted from low altitudes – off the right arm of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. This isn’t the first time Baumgartner has taken on what appears to be a death-defying feat. Joe Kittinger, the former American who 52 years ago successfully made a freefall from 31,333 metres (102,800 feet).īaumgartner and his team are now doing last-minute tests at Roswell, New Mexico, and it seems the attempt, sponsored by Red Bull, is a go. “We want to prove a human person – if they have to bail out of a capsule from 120,000 feet – can come back safely to Earth,” he said.īaumgartner has been training with a team of scientists, medical specialists and Col. The team says that the freefall will also help with future space flight, developing safer equipment for professionals as well as potential space tourists.Īnd he hopes his freefall will benefit space exploration. The project, known as Red Bull Stratos, is not just about record breaking, Baumgartner says. But if he goes into an uncontrolled spin, it could cause him to black out, making it unlikely that he would survive. The helmet of his suit has been also specially designed to protect him from the sonic boom as he passes through the sound barrier.Īfter five minutes of free fall, Baumgartner plans to open his parachute and eventually land safely on Earth. The special suit, the pressurized capsule and the safety protocols designed to protect Baumgartner from all of that have been five years in the making.Īttached to the suit is a specially adapted parachute that allows him to reach the rip cord to open the parachute while inside the suit. Intestines swell, lung tissue ruptures the abdomen distends making it difficult to breath. At 15,240 metres, any gases trapped in the body expand to more than eight times their volume. With little oxygen going to the brain, he or she can begin to speak nonsense. At 3,048 metres, a pilot without an air tank suffers hypoxia. His blood would boil because the boiling point of liquids fall as pressure falls.Īt those altitudes, the temperatures are frigid - as low as -70 C. The air pressure is so thin that without oxygen he would suffocate. If all goes well, Baumgartner hopes he will also break three other world records that have remained unbroken for about 50 years, including the highest manned balloon flight the highest skydive and the longest freefall.īut if something happens to the suit, Baumgartner could find himself in trouble: one puncture could mean instant death. What kind of reaction that creates, I can’t tell you.” ![]() “The fact is you have a lot of different airflows coming around your body and some parts of your body are in supersonic flow and some parts are in transonic flow. “No-one really knows what that will be like,” he told BBC News. Then Baumgartner, wearing a special space suit similar to those worn by NASA astronauts, will step out of the capsule and free fall to Earth, breaking the speed of sound after about 35 seconds. Later this year Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner will attempt to break four world records, including being the first person to break the speed of sound during a freefall.īaumgartner will ascend to at least 36,576 metres (120,000 feet) in a special pressurized capsule that will use a 140-metre helium balloon to lift it to the edge of space. ![]()
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