The jump set the record for the highest manned balloon height, fastest speed of free fall and the first human to break the sound barrier outside of a vehicle. His work, alongside a team of the world's top scientists, engineers and doctors, advanced aeronautical research. To celebrate his achievements, at the start of he was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation hall of fame for pilots and astronauts.
His next goal is to take part in multiple air shows together with the Red Bull Air Force and plan new projects with his helicopter. Skip to Content. Well, it was about in the morning and the sun was coming up, heating the gas in the balloon. As I was valving the gas off to come down, the sun kept heating it up [making it expand and keep the balloon from descending]. After about an hour of that, one of the doctors on the ground called up and asked how much oxygen I had left. I told him I had enough.
They came unglued on the ground. One of the doctors even said I had altitude psychosis, a breakaway phenomena. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Nov 6, , am EDT. Nov 5, , pm EDT. Nov 4, , am EDT. The balloon drifted eastward, climbing a thousand feet a minute. At his station on the ground Kittinger had flight instrumentation and controls that allowed him to vent helium if the balloon climbed too fast, to drop ballast if it did not climb fast enough, and, at the extreme, to cut away the capsule and bring it down safely on its large, cargo-style parachute.
Baumgartner had the same capabilities from inside the capsule and was trained to complete the flight autonomously should contact with Kittinger be lost, but meanwhile, quite reasonably, he had opted to leave the flying to the master. He had covered the clear acrylic door in front of him with a sun shield taped with checklists, so his view outside was limited at best. Above his face was a bank of lights controlled by a camera crew on the ground to illuminate the interior, which otherwise would have been lit only by two small portholes on the sides.
Radio communications and video images were streamed to the public after a second delay, to allow for sanitizing if necessary. In the event of some grave embarrassment, or of a full-fledged catastrophe, the world would not hear and see it in real time, or perhaps ever.
The crisis proceeded in private. Faceplate is another name for a helmet visor. Because he now noticed some fogging when he exhaled, Baumgartner believed that the heating system had failed. The project chief—a tall, gaunt Californian named Arthur Thompson—did some troubleshooting and concluded that the system was working fine. The batteries would deliver 20 minutes of undiminished visor heating—plenty of time for Baumgartner to leave the capsule and fall to an altitude of 10, feet, where he was expected to deploy his parachute and open the visor in preparation for landing.
The logic was solid, but Baumgartner would have none of it. He continued to express concerns about the visor. At Mission Control, the engineers began to express concerns about Baumgartner.
Was he collapsing on them again, and, as had been his pattern in the past, picking on some system to blame? Thompson overruled the objections. He radioed the plan to Baumgartner and instructed him that in the worst case—loss of communications and inability to reconnect—Mission Control would cut the capsule free and bring it down under a reefed parachute to lower altitudes, where Baumgartner could bail out.
Baumgartner was momentarily reassured. But doubts about his mental state endured. The checklist contained 43 items. The order was crucial.
After six minutes Kittinger came to Item 20, instructing Baumgartner to tighten a certain strap known as the helmet tie-down, which cinched the helmet tight to his shoulders and held him in an awkwardly bent position across his lap belt and against the chest pack, in preparation for inflating the pressure suit, which was tailored for an upright or spread-eagled stance but had to be kept in a seated position within the cramped confines of the capsule.
Item 21, use the dump valve, depressurize the capsule to 40, feet, and confirm pressure-suit inflation. Let me know when it inflates. The situation was serious now indeed. The balloon was floating at nearly , feet in ultra-thin air. Inside his sealed helmet Baumgartner had been breathing pure oxygen for more than three hours in preparation for this step. His suit was set to hold 3. The air hissed as it escaped from the capsule.
The pressure suit performed perfectly, enclosing Baumgartner within a stiffly inflated bladder that restricted his motions, but—barring failure—would keep him at a safe pressure until he dropped through 35, feet on the way down.
Kittinger proceeded with the checklist. The Armstrong limit is named for the air-force doctor who identified the phenomenon in the s. The effects of such vaporization are grotesque and deadly. Years ago, during a series of altitude-chamber experiments with guinea pigs, during which the animals puffed up to twice their normal size as they died, the air force forbade its researchers to film the tests out of concern that the images would find their way into public awareness.
During a series of high-altitude test flights in the s, air-force pilots wearing pressure suits flew parabolic arcs in unpressurized F fighters to altitudes above 80, feet. On one of those flights the glove of a test pilot came off, causing his suit to deflate.
Baumgartner was now flying at twice the height of the lethal limit. When the capsule was at last completely depressurized, the door rolled open automatically. The light outside was brilliant. A puff of ice crystals blew through the sky. Without hesitation Kittinger kept working the checklist as if to lock in the progress they had made.
He slid farther forward to assume a position with his legs about a third of the way outside. Stand up on the exterior step. Keep your head down. Release the helmet-tie-down strap. Baumgartner emerged fully from the capsule. Bracing himself against a railing with his left hand, he used his right hand to release the tie-down strap, allowing the helmet to rise off his shoulders and the pressure suit to assume its full and rigid upright position.
This was the point of no return, when re-entry into the capsule became physically impossible. Baumgartner punched a button that triggered a burst of rapid-fire images. He stood on the step for about 30 seconds and in garbled transmissions uttered some high-minded lines.
He hesitated. Felix Baumgartner was born in in Salzburg, Austria. His mother, who is blonde and relatively young, speaks a dialect that is not immediately recognizable as German. When Arthur Thompson visited and saw the instructions, he was taken aback because, though homemade, they read like those of a factory manual. Thompson surmised that Baumgartner had been raised the same way. Baumgartner took up jumping in when he was 16, at a skydiving club in Salzburg.
He joined the Austrian Army, found his way onto its parachute-exhibition team, and for several years jumped almost daily, mastering the finer points of free-fall control.
After he left the army, he lived with his parents and worked as a machinist and motorcycle mechanic to support his skydiving. He was the star of the Salzburg club. The club by then was being subsidized by Red Bull, which is headquartered nearby and supplied parachutes and provided petty cash. For Baumgartner this was not enough: he wanted to earn a living as a stunt jumper, and needed to figure out how.
The problem was that skydiving makes for a poor spectator sport, because it happens high in the air, where audiences cannot go. Even if cameras are brought along, the distances to the ground are so great that the apparent speeds are slow. Furthermore, skydiving is too safe by far. According to a British medical journal, there is evidence that in Sweden it kills only twice as many people, proportionally, as does Ping-Pong in Germany.
If true, this poses obvious challenges for thrill-seeking spectators. In , Baumgartner came upon the solution. It was the act of jumping from cliffs, tall buildings, bridges, and other structures, then deploying a parachute for the touchdown. Because it is fast and close to the ground, it is visually dramatic and an excellent spectator sport.
It is youthful, anarchic, and defiantly carefree. It is also extremely dangerous. With free falls generally lasting only several seconds, and usually in immediate proximity to the structures from which the jumps are launched, the slightest mistake or malfunction can kill. Added to that is the problem that aerodynamic control is minimal since—unlike conventional jumps made from airplanes—BASE jumps start at zero velocity and the jumpers often do not achieve sufficient airspeed to allow for corrective actions before the parachute must open.
BASE jumping is not Russian roulette. Skill and planning count for a lot. But by the time Baumgartner came along, BASE jumping had earned a reputation as one of the most lethal sports of all. Baumgartner has a strong sense for theatrics. He knows what makes for a good YouTube show. Red Bull should have realized this, but when he approached the company about sending him to West Virginia to do his first BASE jump, at an annual festival on the foot-high New River Gorge Bridge, near Fayetteville, his request was refused.
So Baumgartner paid his own way to West Virginia, where he jumped—and, more important, observed that other jumpers lacked his free-fall skills. He went home to Salzburg, practiced barrel rolls and flips, and made a total of 32 BASE jumps before returning to West Virginia a year later, in , and winning what he calls the World Champion title.
He was unusually ambitious and took a strategic approach to the sport. Can you do it? Felix Baumgartner: First person to break sound barrier in freefall An unprecedented eight million people went onto YouTube on 14 October to witness the game-changing moment Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner completed a parachute jump from a height of 38, Back to Hall of Fame.
Born to fly Felix was born in , but his journey truly began at the age of 16, when he completed his first ever skydive. He later left the army and for a short while supported himself by repairing motorbikes.
The helium-filled balloon took Felix on his two-hour journey into the stratosphere. Highest altitude untethered outside a vehicle After depressurising the capsule — the point of no return — Felix perched on its ledge for a few final moments before making his death-defying, multiple record-breaking leap to Earth.
First human to break the sound barrier in freefall Once he had landed back on solid ground, Felix said: "First we got off with a beautiful launch and then we had a bit of drama with a power supply issue to my visor. The exit was perfect but then I started spinning slowly. I thought I'd just spin a few times and that would be that, but then I started to speed up.
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