ROSWELL, N.M. — A man fell to Earth from more than 24 miles high Sunday,
becoming the first human to break the sound barrier under his own power
— with some help from gravity.
A helium balloon made of 40 acres of ultrathin
plastic took Mr. Baumgartner to an altitude of 128,100 feet. Mr.
Baumgartner broke the sound barrier during his jump, reaching a maximum
speed of 833.9 miles per hour, or Mach 1.24.
The man, Felix Baumgartner,
an Austrian daredevil, made the highest and fastest jump in history
after ascending by a helium balloon to an altitude of 128,100 feet. As
millions around the world experienced the vertiginous view from his capsule’s camera,
which showed a round blue world surrounded by the black of space, he
stepped off into the void and plummeted for more than four minutes,
reaching a maximum speed measured at 833.9 miles per hour, or Mach 1.24.
He broke altitude and speed records set half a century ago by Joe
Kittinger, now 84, a retired Air Force colonel whose reassuring voice
from mission control guided Mr. Baumgartner through tense moments.
Engineers considered aborting the mission when Mr. Baumgartner’s
faceplate began fogging during the ascent, but he insisted on proceeding
and made plans for doing the jump blind.
That proved unnecessary, but a new crisis occurred early in the jump
when he began spinning out of control in the thin air of the
stratosphere — the same problem that had nearly killed Mr. Kittinger a
half-century earlier. But as the atmosphere thickened, Mr. Baumgartner
managed to stop the spin and fall smoothly until he opened his parachute
about a mile above the ground and landed smoothly in the New Mexico
desert.
“It was harder than I expected,” said Mr. Baumgartner, a 43-year-old
former Austrian paratrooper. “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. It’s all about coming
home.”
Mr. Kittinger praised Mr. Baumgartner’s courage for proceeding with the
mission and said that he had more than broken a record.
“He demonstrated that a man could survive in an extremely high altitude
escape situation,” Mr. Kittinger said. “Future astronauts will wear the
spacesuit that Felix test-jumped today.”
Mr. Baumgartner was backed by a NASA-style mission control operation at
an airfield in Roswell that involved 300 people, including more than 70
engineers, scientists and physicians who have been working for five
years on the project, called Red Bull Stratos, after the drink company that has financed it.
Besides aiming at records, the engineers and scientists on the Red Bull
Stratos team have been gathering and publishing reams of data intended
to help future pilots, astronauts and perhaps space tourists survive if
they have to bail out.
“We’re testing new spacesuits, escape concepts and treatment protocols
for pressure loss at extreme altitudes,” said the Red Bull Stratos
medical director, Dr. Jonathan Clark, who formerly oversaw the health of
space shuttle crews at NASA. “There are so many things that could go wrong here that we’re pushing the technical envelope.”
While building the customized suit and capsule, the team of aerospace
veterans had to contend with one crucial uncertainty: What happens to
the human body when it breaks the sound barrier? There was also one
major unexpected problem for Mr. Baumgartner, known to his fans as
Fearless Felix.
Although he had no trouble jumping off buildings and bridges, and
soaring across the English Channel in a carbon-fiber wing, he found
himself suffering panic attacks when forced to spend hours inside the
pressurized suit and helmet. At one point in 2010, rather than take an
endurance test in it, he went to an airport and fled the United States.
With the help of a sports psychologist and other specialists, he learned
techniques for dealing with the claustrophobia.
One of the techniques Mr. Baumgartner developed was to stay busy
throughout the ascent. He conversed steadily with Mr. Kittinger, a
former fighter pilot whose deep voice exuded the right stuff as he
confidently went through a 40-item checklist rehearsing every move that
Mr. Baumgartner would make when it came time to leave the capsule.
When the actual moment came, Mr. Kittinger said to him, “All right, step
up on the exterior step. Start the cameras. And our guardian angel will
take care of you now.”
Mr. Baumgartner stepped outside, saluted and made the jump right after
delivering a message that was mostly garbled by radio static. Afterward,
he repeated it: “I know the whole world is watching, and I wish the
whole world could see what I see. Sometimes you have to go up really
high to understand how small you really are.”
Engineers forecast that Mr. Baumgartner would reach a supersonic speed
of 720 miles an hour by jumping from 120,000 feet, the altitude that
they had promised to reach. But all along they had hoped the balloon
would go even higher — and lead to an even faster fall, which did occur.
As a result, even though he fell farther than Mr. Kittinger
did, his fall took less time: 4 minutes and 20 seconds, which was 16 seconds less than Mr. Kittinger’s.
did, his fall took less time: 4 minutes and 20 seconds, which was 16 seconds less than Mr. Kittinger’s.
Mr. Baumgartner jumped from an altitude of 128,100 feet and landed in
desert about 4,000 above sea level, so the jump from capsule to the
ground covered about 23 and a half miles.
When Mr. Baumgartner lost control of his body during the early part of
the jump, he feared going into a flat spin that would send blood away
from the center of his body.
“At a certain R.P.M.,” he said afterward, “there’s only one way for
blood to leave your body, and that’s through your eyeballs. That means
you’re dead. That was what we feared most.”
Because of the limited sensation inside his pressurized suit, he said
recovering from a spin was much more difficult than during an ordinary
dive.
“As a sky-diver, you can feel the air on your right shoulder and you
immediately know what to do,” he said. “Here you don’t feel the air, so
you have to wait until the air pushes you around. Then you think, ‘Oh,
it pushed me around clockwise — that means I have to do this.’ ”
Brian Utley of the FAI, the international federation that certifies
aerospace records, calculated the height and speed of the jump by
independently analyzing data gathered on microchips in Mr. Baumgartner’s
suit. After a thorough analysis of the data is made over the next
several weeks, Mr. Utley said, the precise official figures might be
slightly different, but he had no doubt that Mr. Baumgartner had set a
supersonic speed record.
As the balloon rose in the sky, viewers from around the world went to
YouTube to watch a live video stream from the capsule and mission
control. By the time Mr. Baumgartner made his leap into space, the
audience grew to a peak of eight million.
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