Preparing for a Record-Breaking 23-Mile-DiveLater this year, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner will attempt the highest, longest, boldest freefall in history. Launching from an as-yet-undisclosed location over North America, he will ascend 120,000 feet in a capsule suspended from a high-altitude balloon, open the hatch, and step out into the black vacuum of the stratosphere, plunging at the speed of sound back toward Earth. This feat will top the previous record for the highest freefall - held for 50 years by military test pilot Joe Kittinger - of 102,800 feet above the Earth. Kittinger's effort was funded by the U.S. Air Force in 1960; this one will be paid for, and presumably fueled, by Red Bull.
Jennifer Bogo
The EquipmentA high-altitude balloon made of polyethylene fabric, the thickness of a dry-cleaning bag and filled with helium, will lift a capsule containing Baumgartner to near the top of the stratosphere. With a volume of 29 million cubic feet, it will span 600 feet across at altitude and stretch 600 feet tall. According to Kittinger, "We used a balloon 50 years ago because it was the most practical way to get up there, and it still is."Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowThe capsule developed for the Red Bull Stratos Mission is a 6-foot-diameter fiberglass pressure sphere with a half-inch-thick acrylic door and two side windows. "We started building a gondola and ended up building a spacecraft," says Art Thompson, the mission's technical project director. After Baumgartner has landed, the capsule will be separated from the balloon remotely. The balloon and cable will fall back to Earth in a clump, and the capsule's descent will be slowed by a main parachute and stabilized by a drogue. The capsule has a corrugated crunch pad on the base so that it lands with minimal damage.
Most PopularBaumgartner will be a wearing a full-pressure suit, similar to that worn by shuttle astronauts, but it's been configured so that he can rotate the hip and arm sockets for greater mobility. He can manually deploy a supersonic drogue parachute to help him avoid spinning wildly, and at about 5000 feet, after 5 minutes and 35 seconds of freefall, he'll deploy his main parachute.The RisksWhen Baumgartner first steps out of the capsule he will be accelerating at 32 feet per second, from subsonic through transonic to supersonic speed; at that point he'll be traveling at Mach 1, or about 700 mph. (The average skydiver falls at a terminal velocity of about 120 mph.) How a human body will react to that experience is one of the mission's great unknowns. "Of course I have fear," Baumgartner acknowledges. "But I can use fear to my own advantage; it helps you focus."About 35 seconds into his fall, Baumgartner will break the sound barrier and pass through a shock wave - which typically creates a sonic boom. At that point, for a fraction of a second, one part of his body will be going faster than the speed of sound while the rest of his body could be traveling slower. Based on an incident in 1966, in which a test pilot survived the break up of an aircraft traveling at Mach 3, "We know it is possible [to live through it]," Thompson says. But that fall occurred from a lower altitude, 78,000 feet. "In this realm of the flight envelope," he says, "we don't know with certainty he can transit the sound barrier unencumbered."Lack of air pressure and temperatures as low as minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit also pose risks. Baumgartner will breathe oxygen for two hours prior to his flight, so that nitrogen doesn't bubble in his blood stream under low pressure. Because his pressure suit will be filled with 100 percent oxygen, the engineers have to limit the amount of physiological data, such as heart rate, they collect; any power supply inside the suit can be a source of ignition.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below"The reason [the record] hasn't been broken before is because it's not easy to do," Kittinger says. "A couple people tried; a couple people died. It takes the right equipment, the right team and a little bit of luck."The TrainingWhile Baumgartner has a couple thousand sky dives under his belt, the highest jump prior to this was from 32,808 feet in 2003, as he became the first person to freefall cross the English Channel - which he did with a six-foot carbon wing strapped to his back. Besides spending time in a pressure chamber and vertical wind tunnel, he'll do three training jumps to prepare for the Red Bull Stratos mission, from 23,000, 60,000 and 90,000 feet.By starting low and building on that, Baumgartner will develop the foundation he needs to make split second decisions during the final 120,000-foot jump, Thompson says. "Felix is very calculated," he notes. "People have this misconception of him as a daredevil; he's not. He has the perfect combination of assets for this kind of jump. He reacts fast and calculates quickly."The Pay-OffWhen Joe Kittinger jumped 50 years ago, it was to collect data for the US Air Force and, ultimately, the space program. His effort proved that the humans could survive the harsh environment of the stratosphere in the full-pressure suit of that era. Men walked on the moon nine years later.Neither the Air Force nor NASA is involved in this enterprise, but both stand to benefit from the data being collected, as do private space efforts. Baumgartner is testing a next-generation suit with greater mobility. Plus, a chest pack on the suit will be filled with data recorders, such as accelerometers, GPS beacons, an inertial measurement unit to report attitude and spin, and telemetry equipment that will downlink data during his freefall.Baumgartner will also be demonstrating whether future pilots and astronauts can emergency egress in high-altitude aircraft and descend safely to Earth. Says Jonathan Clark, the mission's medical director, "As much as it is a test flight, it's also a human endurance challenge."Read Next:
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