I had enough. With millions of people around the world watching live on television and online, Baumgartner went for it, and went into a violent spin early in the jump. He regained control, to the relief of his team.
He had about 40 seconds to stop the spinning, which was captured on video from a camera in his suit. That footage will be part of an upcoming National Geographic special. Baumgartner's main challenge was to avoid passing out during his freefall, which lasted I had to use all of my skydiving skills to perform well in those four minutes and twenty seconds.
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? Baumgartner represented something new. He was not another tragic graduate student doing weekend tangos with death. He was a blue-collar guy trying to make a living by performing on-camera. He was emblazoned with logos. And he was calculating. He knew that, no matter how carefully it is approached, every BASE jump involves serious risk. From the start, therefore, he decided to make as few jumps as possible, and to stage them for maximum publicity.
As a result, over the span of his career he has only about BASE jumps to his name—some of his peers have done 1, or more—and yet he has been able to achieve multiple claims to fame. In he dressed up in a white short-sleeved shirt, tie, and glasses, and, with Red Bull cameras in tow, sneaked to the top of the highest building in the world at the time, one of the twin 1,foot-tall Petronas Towers, in Kuala Lumpur, where he crawled out onto a window-washing boom that gave him sufficient horizontal separation, and jumped off, deploying his parachute and reaching the ground safely, then making a video show of running away before being caught.
With his leap from the Petronas Towers, Baumgartner took the world record for the highest jump from a building. He then went to Rio de Janeiro and, after laying flowers on the extended right hand of the giant statue of Christ that overlooks the city, parachuted off the same hand and claimed the world record for the lowest BASE jump ever.
In that stunt, too, he made good his escape on video, vaulting a low wall and climbing into a car that, with squealing tires, sped away, as if the police in Rio cared. Baumgartner kept on stunting—off other famous buildings, off famous bridges, in wing suits off high cliffs, into caves, and across the English Channel on a special high-speed hang glider. He traveled the world. His English improved. He was able to afford his own house. But the stunts began to go stale.
On the video he spreads his arms like Jesus over Rio, then leaps off. At the end he makes the standard show of escaping. It was sad. Taipei turned out to be the last of his BASE jumps. The concept was always the same. The ambition was not original. Kittinger was not an entertainer. He was participating in a government research program whose purpose was to explore certain aspects of human bodies in free fall after ejection from a new generation of airplanes capable of flying at very high altitude—the SR and U-2, among others.
The main problem the program addressed is the tendency of human bodies falling through ultra-thin air to accelerate into uncontrollable flat spins. At the extreme, these spins may have rotation rates greater than three times around every second—producing G loads sufficient to cause cerebral hemorrhage and death.
The solution, as Kittinger demonstrated at great risk to himself, is the use of a small drogue parachute, about six feet across, which serves to tame the spin. Ejection systems have since been equipped with just such stabilizing drogues, and countless lives have been saved as a result.
But, however unintentionally, Kittinger had set a record, and records are meant to be broken. Particularly tantalizing to others was the knowledge that Kittinger had jumped in a seated position, which is not optimal for skydiving; that he had been slowed by a drogue; and that a bigger balloon would have carried him higher and allowed for greater speeds than he had achieved.
Surely an experienced skydiver could go higher, use a pressure suit optimized for a spread-eagle fall, find a way to control the spin without the use of a drogue, bust all the records, and walk away in fame. Baumgartner embraced these hopes. In he had met the Californian Arthur Thompson during a charity go-kart race around an Austrian shopping mall, where they drove for opposing teams.
Thompson has a small company near Los Angeles that has fabricated hundreds of Red Bull promotional cars—mostly Mini Coopers with giant Red Bull cans attached to the back.
Freeze, played by another Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Thompson had worked for years on secret projects for the Northrop Corporation, including the development of the B-2 stealth bomber.
When Baumgartner got serious about breaking the speed of sound, he suggested to Red Bull that Thompson might be the man to help. Lancaster is an ugly street grid scraped through a corner of the Mojave Desert, 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Together with the adjoining city of Palmdale, it houses about , people and forms the sort of California sought out by photographers wanting to make a point about the emptiness of American life.
But precisely because the desert is so obviously unloved, it is home to three of the greatest flight research-and-development facilities in the world: Edwards Air Force Base, Air Force Plant 42, in Palmdale, and the civilian airport in the village of Mojave, a short drive to the north. These facilities have enormous runways that allow for things to go wrong. More important, the research divisions clustered here—for the air force, NASA, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and many smaller companies—are relatively open to the possibility of failure.
The result is a local aerospace culture that sustains a talent pool of top-notch pilots, builders, and engineers. Thompson heard Baumgartner out, then began to make calls around town. What would it take to jump from so high, and at what risk and cost? What precisely had Kittinger done?
What kind of high-altitude balloon would be required to do better? How are such balloons launched and flown? Eventually Thompson flew to Austria and presented Red Bull with some possibilities. In December the company agreed to finance the jump. Thompson quickly brought on some of the most respected people in the industry. Kittinger was one of them. Many had retired recently. To a person they agreed to get involved because of the others involved.
The game was like a mental exercise with consequences: how to take this Austrian stuntman as high as he needed to go, let him fall through the speed of sound, and guarantee to keep him alive.
Felix says he is "officially retired from the daredevil business", and now puts his efforts into his helicopter and public service as a firefighter. His incredible achievement has led to significant advances in research into the stratosphere and space, as well as spacesuits and safety equipment. Each year our knowledge of once unreachable places keeps on growing.
There is no telling where we may go next. 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.
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