Faster than the speed of sound: Supersonic skydiver Fearless Felix hits mach 1.24 in terrifying plummet to Earth from 128,000ft
For more than four nerve-racking
minutes, he was a tiny white speck against a dark sky, hurtling from
24.5 miles above the Earth at up to 834mph.
Then his parachute opened and five minutes later, to the relief of the millions watching, ‘Fearless Felix’ Baumgartner was back on solid ground – having made the highest and fastest skydive in history.
In the process, the 43-year-old Austrian became the first freefall diver to break the sound barrier, and also broke the record for the highest-ever manned balloon ascent.
VIDEO! Click here to see the supersonic jump
He made his death-defying jump from a tiny capsule that took him up to the edge of space.
After days of delays due to bad weather, it took the professional daredevil around two-and-a-half hours to reach 128,177ft above the New Mexico desert - and less than ten minutes to plummet down.
He landed on his feet despite moments during the descent that had silenced his mission control as he appeared to lose control and plunge into a head-over-heels spin.
Falling to his knees, he punched the air in triumph as the control room, packed with scientific experts and family including his teary-eyed mother, Eva, erupted into roars of applause.
Speaking afterwards he said: 'Trust me, when you stand up there on top of the world, you become so humble.
'It's not about breaking records any more. It's not about getting scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive.'
During the first part of Baumgartner's free fall, anxious onlookers at the command centre held their breath as he appeared to spin uncontrollably.
'When I was spinning the first 10, 20 seconds, I never thought I was going to lose my life but I was disappointed because I'm going to lose my record. I put seven years of my life into this,' he said.
He added: 'In that situation, when you spin around, it's like hell and you don't know if you can get out of that spin or not. Of course it was terrifying. I was fighting all the way down because I knew that there must be a moment where I can handle it.'
The extreme sportsman has skydived or base-jumped off statues and skyscrapers around the world, but yesterday’s multi-million pound feat - sponsored by energy drink maker Red Bull, who are refusing to reveal how much they contributed to the final cost - was easily the biggest challenge of his career.
Nobody could be quite sure about the physical effects of breaking the sound barrier in freefall, and if Baumgartner’s pressurised spacesuit and helmet had been damaged it could have been catastrophic.
As he ascended, there were fears the
mission would once again be cancelled after he reported that the heating
device in his visor was not working properly, causing it to mist up.
But after a discussion with his mentor Joe Kittinger - an 84-year-old U.S. Air Force colonel who set the previous freefall record in 1960 when he jumped from 102,800 feet - he decided to go ahead.
As the balloon stopped rising, Baumgartner began conducting his final exit checks. In his bulky suit, he had little room to manoeuvre inside the capsule and had to slide feet first through the hatch.
Gripping the hand rails on either side of the hatch exterior, he hauled himself up on to an outside platform little bigger than a skateboard. After a final salute, he fell forwards in what his team describes as ‘bunny hop’ – pushing out with both feet at the same time to avoid falling into a potentially fatal flatspin.
His team had estimated he would fall at around 700mph in the first 50 seconds, but he managed to travel even faster, reaching 834mph during the first 50 seconds of the four minute 20- second freefall.
The team had also calculated that at about 100,000ft above sea level, Baumgartner would have had to accelerate to about 690mph to break the sound barrier.
The speed of sound varies depending on the temperature and dryness of the air. Where the air is colder, it travels more slowly. But he managed a much higher speed and so was travelling at one and a quarter the speed of sound before he started to slow down as the thicker air closer to Earth created drag on his body.
His success left Col Kittinger with
only one record – for the longest time spent in a freefall. But he was
clearly as relieved as anyone to see the others broken at last.
‘Couldn’t have done it better myself,’ he joked as Baumgartner glided to the ground.
'Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,' an exuberant Baumgartner told reporters outside mission control, shortly after the jump.
He added: 'It is hard to describe [breaking the speed of sound] because I didn't feel it. When you're in a dead pressure suit, you don't feel anything.'
Before sunrise the former Austrian paratrooper's crew had begun unpacking the 30 million cubic foot helium balloon to hoist the capsule that carried him 24.5 miles up in the sky.
The
three-hour ascent began on Sunday at about 9.30am MDT. The jump was
postponed due to wind on Monday, then aborted twice more for the same
reason on Tuesday and
Thursday.
'This is very serious, Joe,' said Baumgartner as the capsule, designed to remain at 55 degrees Fahrenheit, ascended in skies where temperatures were expected to plunge below -91.8 F (-67.8 C). 'Sometimes it's getting foggy when I exhale. ... I do not feel heat.'
As Baumgartner dropped, his lead team member Joe Kittinger told him: 'Our guardian angel will take care of you.'
Kittinger first attempted to break the sound barrier from 19.5 miles up in 1960, reaching a speed of 614mph. He was the only member of mission control who could communicate directly with Baumgartner during the balloon ascent.
Kittinger said his 1960 jump, the first attempt to break the sound barrier, also was delayed by weather. He leapt from a helium balloon-floated, open-air gondola from an altitude of 19.5 miles. He fell just short, at Mach 0.9.
'I was ready to go and had to wait,' Kittinger said at the briefing. 'It's frustrating. But you have to go through it. What you see is what you get.'
Kittinger also was involved in the Air Force's Excelsior project, making
a series of parachute jumps from helium balloons in the stratosphere in
1959 and 1960. Excelsior was a test bed for the nation's space program.
With one balloon flight, 'we waited 30 days and we never got it off,'
Kittinger said.
Weather conditions at the Roswell launch site caused Tuesday's delay as Baumgartner's three-hour ascent in a high-altitude balloon could not start unless ground wind speeds were below two miles an hour.
After the flight was postponed for the second time in as many days, some openly wondered whether there was a deliberate attempt by the Red Bull Stratos team to build suspense.
Coincidentally, Baumgartner's accomplishment came on the 65th anniversary of the day that US test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first man to officially break the sound barrier in a jet.
During weekend practices, Baumgartner went over the technical
details in the capsule before sitting solemnly in his trailer, wearing
his specially designed $200,000 suit, to gather his thoughts.
But a team of engineers, doctors and
pilots spent five years working alongside Baumgartner to
ensure he got down alive.
Banishing talk of nerves, he said beforehand he would never jump if the odds were against him. And he insisted he didn’t have a death wish.
Of the skeptics who doubted what he could achieve, he said simply: ‘I think they underestimate the skills of a skydiver.’
Fearless Felix has been flinging himself out of planes and off skyscrapers for years.
He has clocked up 2,500 skydiving jumps, including one in which he
became the first person to 'fly' across the English Channel, with
carbon-fibre wings strapped to his back.
He has performed various
horrifying ‘base jumps’, freefalling off the Christ statue in Rio and
leaping head-first into a pitch black, 620ft-deep cave in Croatia.
Baumgartner has said that the supersonic plunge will be the end of his 'journey' as a daredevil.
Ahead of his grand
finale, he has completed a couple of high-altitude dress rehearsals. In
July, he leapt from 96,640ft - just 6,000ft shy of the world record set in
1960 by Joe Kittinger.
The grandfather of stratosphere skydiving, 84-year-old Colonel Kittinger became Baumgartner’s mentor and was the voice he heard in his headset as he communicated with mission control before and during the jump.
‘You can feel in your stomach and every part of your body that it does not want to be there,’ said the Austrian, a former military parachutist, laconically.
Baumgartner's body was encased in a specially designed $200,000 spacesuit. It has an insulating exterior that can withstand extreme temperatures, and an airtight inner layer filled with pressurised oxygen.
It also has one crucial difference to the spacesuits worn by astronauts, which is that it remains highly flexible when it is fully pressurised.
Baumgartner’s visor was fitted with an intensely powerful heat regulator that was meant to keep his view free of fog and frost - but almost called for the mission to be abandoned when it failed during the ascent.
The suit’s 12lb chest pack contained monitoring and tracking equipment together with a voice transmitter so he could talk to mission control on the way down. The pack was connected to a device on his wrist that allowed him to monitor his speed and altitude.
The capsule in which he made his ascent was 11ft high and 8ft in diameter, made from fibreglass strengthened by an internal metal frame, and weighed as much as a Volkswagen Beetle.
It was designed by some of the scientists who created the U.S. stealth bomber and was based on the famous Nasa Apollo rocket, but with a few key design differences.
The exit hatch was bigger for a start, designed to prevent the sort of catastrophe that befell Soviet high-altitude sky diver Pyotr Dolgov in 1962. Struggling to leave his capsule in his cumbersome spacesuit, Dolgov cracked his visor slightly on the door.
He
was dead by the time he landed, a victim of ebullism, the terrifying
condition in which the drastically lower air pressure above 62,000ft
makes liquids in the body start to bubble and vaporise, inflating the
body and bringing unconsciousness within 15 seconds.
When inflated, the balloon is as high as a 55-storey building with a volume of 30 million cubic feet.
Made from strengthened plastic, it is
a tenth of the thickness of a sandwich bag. Baumgartner had limited
space to move around in the capsule and the balloon was steered remotely
from mission control down on the ground.
When it reached the jumping height of 120,000ft - three times the altitude at which airliners fly - he looked out on a black rather than blue daytime sky as he waited for the final ‘clear to jump’ message from mission control.
At
that point, he depressurised the capsule, pressurised his suit and
opened the exit door (the capsule automatically detached from
the balloon and parachuted back to Earth).
Then his parachute opened and five minutes later, to the relief of the millions watching, ‘Fearless Felix’ Baumgartner was back on solid ground – having made the highest and fastest skydive in history.
In the process, the 43-year-old Austrian became the first freefall diver to break the sound barrier, and also broke the record for the highest-ever manned balloon ascent.
VIDEO! Click here to see the supersonic jump
On the edge: 'Fearless Felix' pauses before jumping out of the capsule and plummeting back to Earth
One giant leap: Baumgartner begins his freefall after jumping out of his space capsule
Falling down: Baumgartner hit a speed of 834mph
before activating his parachute about 5,000 above the ground in
southeastern New Mexico
He made his death-defying jump from a tiny capsule that took him up to the edge of space.
After days of delays due to bad weather, it took the professional daredevil around two-and-a-half hours to reach 128,177ft above the New Mexico desert - and less than ten minutes to plummet down.
He landed on his feet despite moments during the descent that had silenced his mission control as he appeared to lose control and plunge into a head-over-heels spin.
Falling to his knees, he punched the air in triumph as the control room, packed with scientific experts and family including his teary-eyed mother, Eva, erupted into roars of applause.
Speaking afterwards he said: 'Trust me, when you stand up there on top of the world, you become so humble.
'It's not about breaking records any more. It's not about getting scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive.'
During the first part of Baumgartner's free fall, anxious onlookers at the command centre held their breath as he appeared to spin uncontrollably.
'When I was spinning the first 10, 20 seconds, I never thought I was going to lose my life but I was disappointed because I'm going to lose my record. I put seven years of my life into this,' he said.
He added: 'In that situation, when you spin around, it's like hell and you don't know if you can get out of that spin or not. Of course it was terrifying. I was fighting all the way down because I knew that there must be a moment where I can handle it.'
The extreme sportsman has skydived or base-jumped off statues and skyscrapers around the world, but yesterday’s multi-million pound feat - sponsored by energy drink maker Red Bull, who are refusing to reveal how much they contributed to the final cost - was easily the biggest challenge of his career.
Nobody could be quite sure about the physical effects of breaking the sound barrier in freefall, and if Baumgartner’s pressurised spacesuit and helmet had been damaged it could have been catastrophic.
Fearless: Baumgartner can be seen falling from the sky during the mission
Jubilation: Baumgartner celebrates with one of the member's of his team after completing the jump
But after a discussion with his mentor Joe Kittinger - an 84-year-old U.S. Air Force colonel who set the previous freefall record in 1960 when he jumped from 102,800 feet - he decided to go ahead.
As the balloon stopped rising, Baumgartner began conducting his final exit checks. In his bulky suit, he had little room to manoeuvre inside the capsule and had to slide feet first through the hatch.
Gripping the hand rails on either side of the hatch exterior, he hauled himself up on to an outside platform little bigger than a skateboard. After a final salute, he fell forwards in what his team describes as ‘bunny hop’ – pushing out with both feet at the same time to avoid falling into a potentially fatal flatspin.
His team had estimated he would fall at around 700mph in the first 50 seconds, but he managed to travel even faster, reaching 834mph during the first 50 seconds of the four minute 20- second freefall.
The team had also calculated that at about 100,000ft above sea level, Baumgartner would have had to accelerate to about 690mph to break the sound barrier.
The speed of sound varies depending on the temperature and dryness of the air. Where the air is colder, it travels more slowly. But he managed a much higher speed and so was travelling at one and a quarter the speed of sound before he started to slow down as the thicker air closer to Earth created drag on his body.
Top of the world: Felix Baumgartner steps out of his capsule after reaching a height of nearly 128,000 feet above Earth
Stepping out: Felix Baumgartner's feet can be seen outside the capsule as he prepares to jump from the edge of space
Chute: Baumgartner floats down to the ground with the help of a parachute after the successful leap
‘Couldn’t have done it better myself,’ he joked as Baumgartner glided to the ground.
'Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,' an exuberant Baumgartner told reporters outside mission control, shortly after the jump.
He added: 'It is hard to describe [breaking the speed of sound] because I didn't feel it. When you're in a dead pressure suit, you don't feel anything.'
Before sunrise the former Austrian paratrooper's crew had begun unpacking the 30 million cubic foot helium balloon to hoist the capsule that carried him 24.5 miles up in the sky.
Mission Control: Mission control monitors Baumgartner on his supersonic descent
Triumphant: Baumgartner celebrates his historic and safe return to Earth
Any
contact with the
capsule on his exit could have torn his pressurized suit, a rip that
would expose him to a lack of oxygen and temperatures as low as minus-70
degrees. That could have caused lethal bubbles to form in his bodily
fluids.
But everything went to plan. He
activated his parachute as he neared Earth, gently gliding into the
desert east of Roswell and landing without any apparent difficulty.
Man of the hour: Baumgartner is overjoyed after completing his amazing feat
Overcome: Baumgartner wept with joy upon landing - the first man to achieve a 24-mile skydive
He then was taken by helicopter to meet fellow members of his team, whom he hugged in celebration.
The
balloon is so delicate that it could take off only if winds on the
ground were 2mph or less. Checking through an equipment list from his
seat in the pressurized capsule, Baumgartner expressed concern that his
astronaut-like helmet was not heating properly.'This is very serious, Joe,' said Baumgartner as the capsule, designed to remain at 55 degrees Fahrenheit, ascended in skies where temperatures were expected to plunge below -91.8 F (-67.8 C). 'Sometimes it's getting foggy when I exhale. ... I do not feel heat.'
Nailed it: Baumgartner takes a moment to reflect after a safe landing, thanks to his parachute
Grounded: Baumgartner raises his hands in the air after a safe landing from 24 and a half miles above the earth
Pride: Members of Baumgartner's family watch triumphantly as he completes the jump
Mission control: The members of Baumgartner's
team keep an eye on the extreme skydiver as he ascends further and
further above Earth
Kittinger first attempted to break the sound barrier from 19.5 miles up in 1960, reaching a speed of 614mph. He was the only member of mission control who could communicate directly with Baumgartner during the balloon ascent.
Kittinger said his 1960 jump, the first attempt to break the sound barrier, also was delayed by weather. He leapt from a helium balloon-floated, open-air gondola from an altitude of 19.5 miles. He fell just short, at Mach 0.9.
'I was ready to go and had to wait,' Kittinger said at the briefing. 'It's frustrating. But you have to go through it. What you see is what you get.'
Predecessor: Joe Kittinger, who held the previous record for a freefall to Earth, cheers as Baumgartner completed his jump
Lift: Baumgartner is pictured right with crew
members before the launch, and in his capsule as it's pulled skyward by
a sophisticated weather balloon, left
Time to go to work: Baumgartner is pictured on
Sunday stepping out of a trailer in preparation for his ascent into the
edge of space
Away we go: Felix Baumgartner is lifted into the air by a massive balloon, the first step in his major jump
Millions
watched the event over the internet thanks to 30 cameras placed on the
capsule, the ground and a helicopter. A 20-second delay was set up in
case of a tragic accident.
YouTube said the jump broke its record for simultaneous live streams, with eight million watching during its peak.
As he ascended high above the earth, Baumgartner took to Twitter to greet his fans from space.
He tweeted: 'Live from space! World you are beautiful.'
After the jump, Baumgartner says he plans to settle down with his girlfriend and fly helicopters on mountain rescue and firefighting missions in the U.S. and Austria. the space skydive will be his last jump.
Baumgartner's team had hoped to make the launch in the summer, when there is less wind, but was forced to delay it until October because of problems with the capsule.
But Thompson said on Wednesday the balloons cost
several hundred thousand dollars each, and he estimated the team lost
$60,000 to $70,000 in helium with the aborted jump.
YouTube said the jump broke its record for simultaneous live streams, with eight million watching during its peak.
As he ascended high above the earth, Baumgartner took to Twitter to greet his fans from space.
He tweeted: 'Live from space! World you are beautiful.'
After the jump, Baumgartner says he plans to settle down with his girlfriend and fly helicopters on mountain rescue and firefighting missions in the U.S. and Austria. the space skydive will be his last jump.
Baumgartner's team had hoped to make the launch in the summer, when there is less wind, but was forced to delay it until October because of problems with the capsule.
Keeping in touch: Baumgartner shouted out to his fans on Twitter, from more than 100,000 feet above earth
After the flight was postponed for the second time in as many days, some openly wondered whether there was a deliberate attempt by the Red Bull Stratos team to build suspense.
Coincidentally, Baumgartner's accomplishment came on the 65th anniversary of the day that US test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first man to officially break the sound barrier in a jet.
High flying: Felix Baumgartner can be seen high above New Mexico shortly after beginning his ascent
The jump was more than just a stunt.
Nasa will use data from the freefall to design a new generation of spacesuits for protecting
astronauts and provide an escape option from spacecraft at 120,000 feet.
The dangers at such an altitude were the main focus of the team's preparations. Any contact with the capsule on his
exit could have torn Baumgartner's pressurized suit.
A rip could have exposed him to a lack
of oxygen and temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero,
causing potentially lethal bubbles to form in his bodily fluids, a
condition known as 'boiling blood'.
Finishing touches: Felix Baumgartner is prepped for the historic skydive yesterday
The
nightmare scenario that Felix’s project director likened to a horror
film would have seen his blood boiling, brain bursting and eyeballs
popping out.
This may sound like the sort of lunatic feat that no one but a man who has spent 20 years at the more extreme end of extreme sports would want anything to do with.
This may sound like the sort of lunatic feat that no one but a man who has spent 20 years at the more extreme end of extreme sports would want anything to do with.
Banishing talk of nerves, he said beforehand he would never jump if the odds were against him. And he insisted he didn’t have a death wish.
Of the skeptics who doubted what he could achieve, he said simply: ‘I think they underestimate the skills of a skydiver.’
Fearless Felix has been flinging himself out of planes and off skyscrapers for years.
Sunrise skydive: Workers prepare at the launch
site, ahead of an attempt by Felix Baumgartner to break the speed of
sound with his own body by jumping from a space capsule lifted by a
helium balloon
Baumgartner has said that the supersonic plunge will be the end of his 'journey' as a daredevil.
Rising: Baumgartner's capsule is lifted by a giant weather balloon
The grandfather of stratosphere skydiving, 84-year-old Colonel Kittinger became Baumgartner’s mentor and was the voice he heard in his headset as he communicated with mission control before and during the jump.
‘You can feel in your stomach and every part of your body that it does not want to be there,’ said the Austrian, a former military parachutist, laconically.
Baumgartner's body was encased in a specially designed $200,000 spacesuit. It has an insulating exterior that can withstand extreme temperatures, and an airtight inner layer filled with pressurised oxygen.
It also has one crucial difference to the spacesuits worn by astronauts, which is that it remains highly flexible when it is fully pressurised.
Baumgartner’s visor was fitted with an intensely powerful heat regulator that was meant to keep his view free of fog and frost - but almost called for the mission to be abandoned when it failed during the ascent.
The suit’s 12lb chest pack contained monitoring and tracking equipment together with a voice transmitter so he could talk to mission control on the way down. The pack was connected to a device on his wrist that allowed him to monitor his speed and altitude.
The capsule in which he made his ascent was 11ft high and 8ft in diameter, made from fibreglass strengthened by an internal metal frame, and weighed as much as a Volkswagen Beetle.
It was designed by some of the scientists who created the U.S. stealth bomber and was based on the famous Nasa Apollo rocket, but with a few key design differences.
The exit hatch was bigger for a start, designed to prevent the sort of catastrophe that befell Soviet high-altitude sky diver Pyotr Dolgov in 1962. Struggling to leave his capsule in his cumbersome spacesuit, Dolgov cracked his visor slightly on the door.
Preparation: A spotlight illuminates the capsule Felix Baumgartner used for the world record skydive
When it reached the jumping height of 120,000ft - three times the altitude at which airliners fly - he looked out on a black rather than blue daytime sky as he waited for the final ‘clear to jump’ message from mission control.
Out of the gate: Baumgartner steps out from his trailer during the final manned flight for Red Bull Stratos
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