It's just a little bit ironic that you can't express your opinion that an internet celebrity is overexposed without name-checking another internet celebrity.
For those unfamiliar with Maddox, he is a blogger whose public persona is in fact an over-the-top professional pompous ass. So your observation is spot on, but he does it on purpose.
One accomplished person should not be belittling the accomplishments of another.
A good check to see if something is a joke is to see if you thought it was funny. To me it looks as if he wants to make this seem totally insignificant, and to increase his own stature by appearing to be above (pun intended) this all.
> I'll bet he would have a different opinion if it was him standing on that little ledge before stepping off.
I don't know. Most scientists I know have a tendency to put things back into perspective to highlight the really impressive stuff, so yeah, afterwards they would very probably say "Yeah and you may think that was high, but compared to a school globe, on scale it was only a millimeter. Isn't it amazing how stupefyingly BIG space is?!!", though that may make the Red Bull marketing team somewhat angry :P
> «The "Edge of Space" jump: A corresponding fall to a schoolroom globe begins 1 millimeter above its surface. I'm just saying.» [1]
> «I'm told somebody's jumping out of a perfectly good balloon from 23-miles up. The theory of gravity no longer needs to be tested in this way»[2]
Oh come on... this man worked and prepared for this for 5 years and the way I understand it, there were definitely some uncertainties about how his body would take it; black out, red out, burst arteries etc. so even in the case of all parts working as intended and a safe landing he was in enough danger. A lot of preparation and a lot of technology went into this.
Why belittle it like that? Just because it did not immediately bring humanity forward a gigantic leap? You could argue the same about music, heck Mozart's and Bach's works are just soundwaves and the same frequencies have been tested very thoroughly, they propagate through air and water just fine! All sorts of colours can be found in nature, why draw a painting? No need to test whether our eyes can perceive colours on a canvas!
I am sorry, Mr. deGrasse Tyson, but humans are more than just efficient, self-improving robots and our most human moments were and are to be found in play and in otherwise completely "useless" activities like art, music, sports or record-chasing which do nothing but making us and maybe others feel good or thrilled and captivating people's attention for a moment.
For one, as other people have pointed out, these are jokes. They aren't intended to belittle anything that is useless; they are just meant to provide a little perspective about something that is getting a lot of hype.
For another, the hype has been a bit excessive on this one. Calling this "the edge of space" is not really honest. He jumped from 23 miles up, from a balloon. Just the fact that he jumped from a balloon should make you stop to ask if it's really "space"; one of the defining features of "outer space" is that it's beyond Earth's atmosphere, and if a balloon is functional, it is not beyond the atmosphere. While where "space" begins is a bit of a fuzzy question, as the atmosphere slowly thins rather than stopping at an exact altitude, a commonly accepted limit is 100km (62 miles) above sea level. Other measures range from 50 miles to 76 miles. Regardless, 23 miles is nowhere near "the edge of space".
Now, he did break some impressive records; highest manned balloon flight, highest skydive, and greatest speed in free fall. But he did not, by most measures, approach the edge of space. So throwing in a little perspective about that is not bad, it's just deflating the hype a little.
I knew about the space missions, just don't know much about the vessels they used to get the men into space!
I guess I showed my ignorance, but I did learn something. It's been many years since I saw the movie, to be honest... and that's about the extent of my knowledge of the mission.
P.S. they happened in the '60s and '70s. I'm in my 30s with two kids. You're not that old :-)
Perhaps you're legitimizing his insult because of who he is? I certainly think that if some random person made the same comment, many would not rush to their defense.
Yeah, I think NDT has earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his sentiments about the importance of science and exploration. So yes, it is different than if some random schlub said the same thing.
What are the tropes in the first joke with the 1mm? Not being a native speaker, these must have been lost on me. The second quote, I agree, there is something there. I just wanted to point out it shouldn't matter how "useless" it is in the perspective of all things because that's pretty much 90% of humanity's doing and playing - just in case anyone took these too serious.
"I'm just saying" is a trope. It's certainly not as tropey as what you see in the second joke. The humor in the first is in the pure ridiculousness of comparing the height with what it would be on a globe, which is why it's written with the adoption of the sort of persona that would follow up a comment with "I'm just saying."
Well, there's the fact that marketers are primarily there to make things look interesting. We're all very aware of this. Marketers gonna market. A snappy bit of branding like 'The Edge of Space' sounds much better than 'Jump From High Atmosphere'.
90% of the people who watched probably don't care that it's not technically the edge of space, and whilst we can all spend time quibbling about it and getting semantics right, we're wasting time going "Not technically space!" when we should instead be focussing on the achievements made.
Really, that's the main achievement of this? Not the testing of the next-gen pressure suits? Or the scientific data on the effects of free-fall and Mach level speeds on the human body? Or the fact that the results will be able to be applied to ongoing efforts with space travel?
This was special for me. I wasn't alive when the moon landings or early space program happened. Space shuttles were exciting, but mechanized and somehow predictable; I was probably too young to appreciate them and by the time I was old enough to appreciate what was going on they were routine (even that disasters were disasters not because it was crazy to try an launch some massive machine with a bunch of people in it into space, but because some sort of process or engineering failed... we expected success).
This was different. A balloon, a capsule, and a single man with a suit supported by years of engineering and hard work. My whole family watched as Felix stepped out onto the little skateboard sized step; we held our breaths as he jumped. We watched the infrared camera as he started to tumble and I wondered how I would explain his death to my 4-year old who was watching too. I'm glad I didn't have to. I'm glad I get to explain how hard work, engineering, bravery, a very talented team and a little bit of individual craziness can do some amazing things.
For me this was special to watch. Thanks to everyone who participated in making this event happen.
No it doesn't. The problem with the sonic boom in fighter jets and the associated forces it produces is because the control surfaces of the planes at the time weren't designed to deal with the effects from supersonic speeds[0], so they would lose control.
There is no 'force' associated with breaking the sound barrier, as most would imagine
Most of the forces in the freefall would have been G forces from the tumbling or spinning motion as he jumped out.
[0] the tl;dr for aircraft is that as you approach and overtake mach 1, at some point the airflow at the beginning of the wing is supersonic while at the rear of the wing it is not, as you accelerate this point moves from the front of the wing to the rear. the problem is that it causes the airflow from that point to separate from the wing which results in a stall, spin, crash etc.
This is slightly misleading. There is wave drag, which is caused by the formation of shocks. This happens when the plane/body is nearing the speed of the pressure wave it creates ahead of itself. The air no longer has sufficient time to flow around the body in a smooth (or even turbulent) way. Instead it piles up into sharp discontinuities called shocks, with very low pressure regions behind the shocks. This produces a lot of drag, several times more than that due to viscous drag alone. That's where the concept of a 'sound barrier' came from. People weren't sure what the maximum drag would be, or if we could build engines powerful enough to overcome it. Obviously we can and did.
But in the case of free fall from space or near space, the air is so thin that these effects are minimal. Also his starting velocity moving through the thin air is much lower than say a reentering space craft, so the whole thing is much more mild and manageable. By the time the air gets thick enough to worry about, he'll have shed enough speed to even the slight early drag to be at a reasonable terminal velocity. (This is the same concept used by SpaceShipOne's 'shuttlecock' re-entry).
A. Starting height = 39045 m
B. Desired speed = 343 m/s
C. Acceleration = 9.8 m/s/s
D. Average speed while accelerating = 171 m/s (half of B)
E. Time to reach desired speed = 35 s (B divided by C)
F. Therefore distance travelled = 5985 m (D times E)
G. Therefore altitude at Mach 1 = 33060 m, give or take the small amount of drag.
Edit: Meh, I see from the video that he didn't accelerate as fast as this, I guess the drag was significant after all. Even a small amount of gas will move you if it's coming at you at significant speeds...
He was just asked this at the press conference, and he replied that he felt nothing as he is in a pressurised suit (he could neither feel or hear anything during the fall).
Consider that if a dozen people submit this story with the correct title but their submissions count as upvotes / duplicates to this first submission then the algorithm may automatically correct the title to the most common submission which is likely the actual article.
Exactly, here on HN we don't need those new-fangled "collapsible comments" like Reddit has. We prefer to treat our threaded comments like mere oddly layouted linear threads and allow no digressions!
"Load more comments" and "comment score below threshold" ... we have the technology ...
I'd like to see if this can be extended to re-entering from orbit. This could make space travel more practical, as there'd be less weight dedicated to re-entry vehicles.
(The only thing that needs to come back from orbit is the astronaut. The whole idea of reusable spacecraft is completely impractical, as weight is by far the biggest expense.)
While burning off excess speed is one major concern for this approach, I've always wondered what it would take to use a balloon like this one to get past some of the tricky parts of rocketry like dealing with atmosphere and carrying extra fuel to carry the extra fuel you are carrying. If you could launch a rocket from 40km (roughly the height of the balloon), you're 25% into the minimum LEO, and ~10% of the way to the ISS. More importantly, the fuel savings from launching at a higher altitude are exponential, because each meter of altitude is one meter of less atmospheric drag (with diminishing returns) and the corresponding fuel/weight savings from not having to carry fuel to travel the first 40km.
I would imagine that the current limitations on doing something like this are related to the maximum weight a hot air balloon can lift, in addition to the untested physics and engineering of a mid-air space launch. Imagine if SpaceShipOne (which was launched at 13.3km) could be taken to 40km and then launched.
Perhaps someone with a better understanding of lighter-than-air lift physics could explain what the current limitations on this are.
Suppose you could use a balloon to get to LEO altitude. You're still not in orbit. Anything that actially is in orbit will come hurtling at you faster than a bullet. Most of the fuel used in getting to LEO is used to achieve orbital speed, not orbital altitude. So the question of ground launch vs space launch is really one of where your engines operate most efficiently, or if you can avoid air friction in the dense lower atmosphere, or that sort of thing. Baumgarnter was nowhere close to "10% of the way to the ISS."
A good way to sort of wrap you mind around exactly LEO means is to consider that at LEO altitudes the strength of gravity is, for most intents and purposes (9.0m/s^2 vs 9.8m/s^2), the same as on the surface. If you get up that high then let go, you are going to drop like a rock.
If you want to not fall, you have to keep thrusting straight up, which obviously is not practical. The next best thing is to try to move sideways. Sideways fast enough that you clear the horizon before you hit the ground. You have to move fast enough that when you fall you miss the earth.
Moving that fast is pretty damn hard. Any rocket capable of doing it, even if it is already "up there" is going to be far to large to practically lift with a balloon.
> You have to move fast enough that when you fall you miss the earth.
So what you're saying is that there is an art, or rather, a knack to flying, and that the knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss?
You're right about acceleration being an issue. It's possible that altitude is negligible compared to orbital velocity. I'm not sure what you mean by Baumgartner wasn't 10% of the way to the ISS. The ISS is at 370km, and the jump was from almost 40km. Of course there are other technical hurdles to getting there, but I was only referring to pure altitude.
Without doing any math, I would think the main constraint is the sheer size of the balloon that you would need to lift any significant mass. That said there are some people who are proposing things like this with at least some seriousness:
Interesting. I wonder what the theoretical maximum height/weight is achievable with current LTA materials. I was thinking that the LTA vehicle would act as a miniature space elevator, with a launch craft carrying the traditional rocket part of the way through the atmosphere, and then launching the rocket the rest of the way up and into orbit.
You've got it backwards. It is completely impractical to build an entire spaceship, and then throw it away after every launch. Reusable vehicles are the only way to get launch costs down.
You can boil the transportation cost function down to a single independent variable: flight rate. For low flight rates, the costs per flight are very high, and are dominated by the labor of the engineers who design and build the vehicles. For higher flight rates, the costs drop, and are dominated by the costs of the physical materials used to build the vehicles. And for the highest flight rates, the costs bottom out and are dominated by the cost of fuel. All current modes of transportation (cars, buses, trains, ships, and airliners) have their cost dominated by the fuel cost. Only space travel is the outlier. Why? Because we're throwing every vehicle away after a single use!
Not to mention, any launch vehicle must have a capsule able to withstand re-entry anyway, to handle high-velocity launch aborts, so you might as well use it for an actual reentry later.
And to answer your original question, you could conceivably survive reentry from orbital velocities using a very large ballute:
Take a hard look at the shuttle. Most of it - the weight, the complexity, the cost - comes from trying to bring it back intact. Wings, landing gear, hydraulics, flight control systems, etc., is all there solely to bring it back.
All that extra weight means a much bigger rocket is needed to push it up, it means you've got far, far less payload, and you're still stuck in low earth orbit only.
Weight is so expensive I don't think the economics can ever pan out for reusable rockets.
Most of it comes from a series of awful compromises with the military. The Air Force wanted it that big so they could put up and recover very large classified cargos from various places, iirc in less than one orbit.
Also, if the shuttle had actually been used as much as intended the cost wouldn't have been nearly as much.
You can make a reusable launch vehicle that's economical. You can also make one that is incredibly expensive, if its poorly designed. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Kind of like how most cars are cheap on a per-use basis, but it would be insane to use a formula-1 racecar as your daily driver.
That's basically the shuttle. In fact, it's worse. More like putting that F-1 engine in an 18-wheeler sized truck, only doing 2 trips to the grocery store per year, and having the ferrari racing team's engineers and mechanics rebuild the engine and replace the tires after every trip.
>You can make a reusable launch vehicle that's economical.
I find that difficult to believe, given the enormous extra weight that will be necessary.
Look at the Apollo rocket, with that teeny tiny capsule on top of that massive thing. The capsule was the only thing that came back, and that whole massive rocket was needed to push that little capsule to the moon.
Now add wings, landing gear, etc., to the capsule, and imagine how much bigger the Saturn V would have to be.
Wings aren't the only way. Both Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) are pursuing reusable launch vehicles that land vertically by gimbaling and throttling the rocket engines.
This isn't wishful thinking either -- both have already done some initial low altitude VTVL tests. Videos here:
The main difference is that the skydiver started with a velocity of 0. The astronaut in low earth orbit is going to be starting with a velocity of something like 28,000 km/h.
Right. But the atmosphere is exponential, so the idea would be to have a high drag/mass for the start, to slow you down before compression heats things up.
A capsule is small and heavy, so it'll have enough inertia to push up the compression and hence reentry heat.
Yes and no. So when you are in orbit you're travelling around the planet at a high rate of speed. You have to dump all of the kinetic energy related to your zipping around in order to head down to the ground. Typically something like the shuttle uses orbital manuevering rockets to decelerate such that the orbit becomes eccentric and intercepts the atmosphere. Then when the atmosphere is entered it bleeds off still more energy by colliding with air (which creates a tremendous amount of heat). Once that energy is dissipated it glides down to the ground.
For parachute jump from orbit, first you'd want to dump as much of your velocity as possible while still being outside the thicker part of the atmosphere. You could do that with a retro rocket, or my favorite is a conductive tether tied to a resistive load. In the latter case you use the fact that you're moving through Earth's magnetic field which generates a current in a conductor that is at an angle to the magnetic flux. If you ground short that conductor then it pushes back against the flux much like a shorted motor pushes back against you trying to spin it when its terminals are shorted.
It is entirely unclear to me if you can dump enough energy that way but you can certainly dump quite a bit. Once you are into the upper atmosphere there are a variety of ideas from what are essentially streamers to hypersonic parachutes to slow you further.
If you can't dump enough energy then you won't be able to avoid being crisped by the heat generated by your re-entry shock wave.
But you need a spacecraft to get an astronaut back up anyway. I don't know; I guess you could launch large capsules that were just space station components and add them on to your space station with every launch.
Exactly, without all those wings, landing gear, flight controls, hydraulics, etc., you've got weight avaible to spend on payload. Remember the "pay" in payload, it's the point of the mission.
The only things that need to come back are the astronauts.
Incredible. This kind of stuff puts my faith back in humanity. With all the horrible stuff going in the world, you see something like this and its simply amazing.
I actually got teary eyed when he landed and fell to his knees. Such a huge leap for the space program.
This is the big change between now and Kittinger's jump in 1960: private, truly non-governmental* companies can and will achieve incredible things just to market some sugar water.
* I see a distinction between companies like SpaceX and those like Lockheed, in the will to do things if nothing else.
1960 was 50 years ago, the government (or multiple world governments) could be bank rolling a human mission and initial human outpost on Mars right now if that was a priority the public would support.
Very true. The question is whether the government saw sense and scaled back it's unsustainable future drive, or whether things just stalled. I'm still undecided.
The government put a man on the moon so they could appear more technologically capable than the Soviets. Once they got their propaganda piece, the incentive died out.
That link will expire once the thread 404s and imgur does not accept files over 2MB so here is an alt link from tinypic: http://i47.tinypic.com/30vllw6.jpg
If you've ever gone skydiving, you'll know that once you have trust in the technology that deploys the canopy, you can get fairly blase about the exit. Also, the height becomes sort of abstract above a certain level - even at 3000 feet, the world below doesn't look particularly real, it looks like a very detailed model with cute little moving cars and stuff.
I totally can understand how that would be the case. But I find it hard to believe that the experience might not be just a little bit different when you are looking across the top of the atmosphere, waiting to hit Mach 1 and hoping you won't spin like a rag-doll until the G forces shred your internals.
Personally, I have a continual internal struggle with sky diving. I really want to try it, but I have enough of a fear of heights that I'm not sure I could convince myself of the abstractedness of it.
I haven't gone skydiving, so maybe you know better than I do, but wasn't this exit more perilous than most? He had to leave the platform with as little spin as possible since there wasn't enough atmosphere for him to control his descent.
Or maybe they just hyped the danger to make people keep watching?
The gravitational acceleration is equal to G * M/r^2 where G is the gravitational constant (G = 6.67 * 10^(-11) N * m^2/kg^2) M is the mass of Earth (M = 5.97 * 10 ^24 kg) and r is the radius of the Earth (average radius = 6.37 * 10^6 m).
At the place where he jumped out the gravitational acceleration would roughly be:
g = G * M/((6.37 * 10^6 m) + (39000 m))^2 ~= 9.69 m/s^2
This is not far from the normally used 9.8 m/s^2 and this would of course get larger as he gets closer to the ground.
Well not really that giant leap, since Joseph Kittinger basically did the same jump 50 years ago [1].
He actually was in freefall longer (4min and 36 seconds), which hence is still the world record. Since Felix "only" fell for 4min and 22 seconds.
Also, as Neil deGrasse Tyson funnily put it: «I'm told somebody's jumping out of a perfectly good balloon from 23-miles up. The theory of gravity no longer needs to be tested in this way» [2]
But still, cool video and congrats to Felix and the Rebull Stratos team.
He was spinning like crazy for quite some time - that literally had my heart beating like crazy - i was like - what's going to happen - is he unconscious - is the automatic parachute ejection not working - then; later was happy to seem him gain control on his free fall. :-)
i'd love to see some stats on youtube for this. i noticed over 6 million concurrent viewers, flipped to HD and it worked instantly ... it's purely amazing to push out these amounts of video data.
I have not seen this noted anywhere so far (comparisons are always with Kittinger's jump duration), but it's actually a great point. Only the longest free fall would have to be counted inbetween station boosts, so it would presumably be a lot shorter (but maybe a lot longer than 4minutes?).
He took the record for fastest freefall (supersonic), highest skydive and highest manned balloon flight. Pretty sure he'll be happy with that, and to let Kittinger keep longest freefall.
I'm not sure about the fastest free fall part--how is free fall defined for purposes of this record? In particular, how does the record not belong to Bill Weaver, the test pilot whose SR-71 disintegrated at Mach 3.18?
Freefall is generally defined in terms of vertical speed.
If you exit a DeHavilland Twin Otter that's doing 90 knots forward speed, yes, you get "forward throw" from the plane...but you still have to accelerate vertically before reaching terminal velocity. As a skydiver flying on your belly in an arched position, you usually fall at ~5 seconds per 1000 feet...excepting the first 1000 feet, which takes ~10 seconds to fall as you move from 0 vertical speed to 120mph.
(It's that age-old physics problem of whether the forward speed of a projectile has an effect on its downward velocity.)
The fastest freefall and the longest freefall are at odds with one another. Additionally, the record holder used a drogue parachute to slow his descent.
IMO (skydiving instructor, world record holder with ~800 jumps), it doesn't necessarily contradict the definition of freefall...and was in keeping with Kittinger's mission (which was to test whether a Mercury astronaut with no skydiving experience could exit their spacecraft safely in the event of an emergency during the ascent).
The jump on which the 1960 record was set was Joe Kittinger's 34th jump.
Regardless, tandem skydiving rigs traditionally use drogues to stabilize and slow the freefall. So while they do provide drag, and semantically one could say that it's not "terminal velocity", ask anyone who's made a tandem jump: 120mph is freefall.
I'd say if a drogue is landable, you could call it a parachute. Most drogues are ~2 feet in diameter and only slow you down by, say, 20mph...not exactly landable.
Maybe the skydiving community has its own definition of free fall? My books say there can't be any force on you except gravity, which seem to rule out any apparatus intended to slow the fall.
As @xymostech mentioned, any time you're in the atmosphere, there's obviously air resistance (i.e., drag) as a factor. So according to most physicists, true freefall would only exist in a vacuum.
If you don't consider air resistance to be a "force besides gravity," then it becomes a somewhat semantical question of where you draw the line of "apparatus intended to slow the fall." In your statement above, what does "you" mean?
Even without a drogue, your vertical speed can be influenced by such subtleties as what you're wearing. If I wear a zero-porosity nylon jumpsuit and fly on my belly, I'll fall at roughly 120mph. If I fly in baggier clothes, or throw on a sweatshirt over that jumpsuit, I can slow to 115mph. If I'm wearing a heavier rig with a bigger parachute in it, my rate of speed will increase. You get the idea.
So again, semantically, if we ignore the fact that air resistance is a force besides gravity, would the only way to achieve freefall be to jump from an aircraft naked, wearing no parachute?
Ultimately, no matter what you're wearing, terminal velocity is different for every person or object falling through the atmosphere. It's the sum total of gravity and drag, semantics or not. :)
Yes, free fall can be fuzzy due to clothes and whatnot. But someone who didn't use a drogue chute should be able to have a shorter free fall time yet still be eligible to claim the record for longest free fall time, all else being equal.
But there's obviously air resistance, otherwise you wouldn't ever slow down. And the drogue is just providing more air resistance. I tend to agree with you, that I don't think that should count as free fall, but gravity is certainly not the only force being exerted.
Don't know if there are standards for this, but here is what Wikipedia says about the previous jump:
"On August 16, 1960, he made the final jump, from the Excelsior I999II, at 102,800 feet (31,300 m).[2] Towing a small drogue parachute for initial stabilization, he fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, reaching a maximum speed of 614 miles per hour (988 km/h)[4][5] before opening his parachute at 18,000 feet (5,500 m)."
Indeed, he didn't break the speed of sound. When he hit around an estimated 729mph, he was spinning a fair bit. It looked as if he made the decision to attempt to stabilize (I think he mentioned during descent that he thought he was going to pass out) himself at the cost of not breaking the sound barrier.
On their website they say that the speed of sound would be about 690mph at the height that he was expected to reach it, not 768mph – that speed just applies at standard temperature and pressure.
I would very much like confirmation on that point, but it seems to me that pointing to the 729mph you saw is no such confirmation.
On the live stream they said he topped 1173km/h. What speed was the target ? I mean speeds are defined in air and 'normal condition', there was almost no gas around him during his fall right ?
No, he probably did this to leave Joe Kittinger one of his world records, because Joe was the essential team member who made this mission possible for Felix.
They've mentioned that even something like acquiring a replacement balloon would take weeks, let alone the men and materials involved in such an effort. I doubt the funding or will is there to go for it, at least without another level up of altitude.
At the peak they released helium to slow his ascent. At around 126k ft he accelerated and was ascending at 2000ft/min (twice as fast as he was going for most of the trip). It would have been interesting to see where it would have naturally stopped.
This did seem quite surprising to me as well - I think they might have let it go if it wasn't quite such a high rate of ascent. 2000ft/min could easily give them a final altitude way above what they'd expected.
Consider the risk of having the balloon go pop while he was still in the capsule.
Mission shot to hell with no chance of recovery all for going beyond the design parameters of the balloon.
They did well by playing it safe and not letting the ascent get out of control or too much above the target. Better to have 3 records set than an uncontrolled ascent with a small possibility of higher records (but not more of them) and a significant chance of disaster.
i doubt he's gonna do it anytime soon. it took them ages to prepare for this and in local interviews (saw them in Austria) he mentioned a couple of times that he finally wants this to be over and move on to something else. but technically, there's definitely more room to go crazy.
Current Free Fall Record - 4:36 - and still holding
Felix's Free Fall time - 4:22
Short by 14 seconds. Guess he pulled the parachute, when his helmet wiser started fogging up. Would have been great to have him break the existing record after having jumped off from a higher altitude than the earlier record jump. Good luck next time - to whoever makes the next jump.
I have huge respect for people who make this sort of call - deploy the parachute when it needs to be deployed, not when it would land him another record.
Like mountaineers who turn back before reaching the summit, because they know that getting there is only part of the effort.
As skydivers, we don't count. That's just the stuff from movies.
We have altimeters that we trust to tell us our height. But more than those, we trust our best altimeter - our eyes. Visor fogging prevents you from knowing how high you are - either by looking at your altimeter, or looking at the ground. And that's a very dangerous place to be - particularly on an unprecedented freefall like this one.
My guess is that Felix spent a while trying to get a glimpse at his altimeter. He finally saw enough to tell him he was getting somewhere close to deployment altitude, and decided to make the safe choice.
Okay, if he thought he was close to the deployment altitude then of course it's perfectly sensible to use the parachute. It's only if he was nowhere near it that I would question using the chute right away in response to vision impairment.
And I haven't watched any movies with skydiving, I just figured that if you were watching an altimeter drop you would be able to extrapolate for a limited time.
It's definitely an interesting question to consider. Our rule of thumb in skydiving is, "When in doubt, whip it out." You'd rather deploy too high than too low. There's a big hunk of granite coming up pretty fast that you don't want to interface with. :)
In Felix's case, deploying too high could be a huge problem as well. So I'd be very interested to hear why/how he chose to deploy where he did.
And yeah, under normal circumstances you could possibly extrapolate your altitude...but the problem is that once you can no longer see, you can't go back and get a good idea of where you were at prior to it happening. Visor fogging creeps up fast (even from 12,500'), and once it does, it's very difficult to even find a baseline from which to extrapolate.
Most of those sorts of options will do more harm than good. If you've ever attempted to skydive (or fly in a wind tunnel), you know that the slightest move of one's hand can cause instability, or a spin. It takes a lot of experience to gain enough control to be able to really fly your body (and in the dead air at the altitude of this jump, all previous bets are off). Adding any sort of wings, fins, or whatnot would cause more uncertainty than it would certainty. (This is why wingsuits are so dangerous to fly - the extra surface area means that the subtlest of moves are magnified significantly.)
The safest option is a drogue parachute - the small stabilization parachute you see when watching tandem skydiving videos. They kept a drogue as an automatic backup to attempt to stabilize him if he encountered an uncontrollable spin.
But even that has its risks. An entanglement on a jump like this (or any jump, really) could be a death warrant.
they also had other ideas like a long heavy ball falling first with a long rope that he's attached to to stabilize as well as small rockets to counter-steer things, but it wouldn't couldn't as a completely free fall somehow, they said.
I suspect this will be shown in the upcoming documentary. I understand the BBC were filming this to be shown in around a month's time (National Geographic will show a 2 hour documentary on this based on the BBC footage).
Are we talking about the speed record? It depends on a number of variables, most notably being body position and altitude.
The higher the altitude, the thinner the air. Whereas terminal velocity at 10,000' MSL (mean sea level) is 120mph, if you go up to 30,000', terminal is faster due to less air molecules to create drag.
As for body position, if I'm flying my body belly-to-earth, in a stable arched body position, I'll fall a lot slower than I will flying head-down with my arms tucked to my sides. Apparently, Felix was attempting to increase his speed by flying close to head-down - he flared out in mid-attempt when his visor began to fog and decreased his visibility. (You probably saw the spinning on the video as he reached close to 730mph - to me, that appeared to be the result of him flaring out of his head-down dive to a belly-to-earth body position in the thin air, which doesn't provide a lot of control).
Additionally, if he were to make this jump in a latex suit, he'd be moving a lot faster due to decreased drag. (However, he'd also be dead from exposure to cold.)
So the "natural upper limit" is basically however fast he went, given the equipment, altitude, and body position. If we change the variables, we'd get a different maximum speed. Terminal velocity is terminal velocity, given all those factors.
Thanks for such a thorough reply! I'm very curious about the highest possible (and feasible) altitude. I couldn't find out how high you can go and still fall towards the Earth. (At some point you would just orbit the Earth, right?)
> (At some point you would just orbit the Earth, right?)
No way. I think you really misunderstand how weightlessness works in space, and I can assure you it's much more interesting than you think. :-p
While gravity does decrease with distance, it doesn't decrease nearly as fast as you think. For instance, at the altitude of the International Space Station (280 miles, or roughly ten times the altitude of this jump), the force of gravity is still 90% as strong as on the surface of the Earth.
In fact the only reason people are "weightless" up there is because they're constantly falling towards the surface of the earth. (Think of if you're in an elevator whose cable snaps, you'll appear to be "weightless" inside the elevator).
Fortunately for the astronauts, the ISS is moving horizontally so fast, that the Earth is actually falling away from them (due to it being round) at the same rate that they're falling to the ground.
This is the same with, say, the space shuttle. The reason people seem to float in there is because the thing is falling like a rock. It just happens to be moving forward 17,000 mph, so the earth falls away with it.
To orbit, he'd need horizontal velocity. I'm pretty sure you could, in theory, fall to Earth from anywhere short of Sun-Earth L1 (about 1.5 million! km) if you had zero velocity relative to Earth, and if you made sure to miss the Moon on the way down.
No, you won't orbit just by going high enough. To orbit you need to going fast enough horizontally that as you fall you never hit the body you're orbiting.
If you just keep going straight up you'll eventually fall back to Earth, or be on your own independent orbit around the Sun.
The biggest issue is getting up there. A balloon will only go so high, after that you'd need powered flight.
The maximum speed is the escape velocity of earth. That's the fastest you can fall to earth - assuming you started from infinitely far away. Which also answers your question: The is no maximum altitude. (Although if you get far enough away you'll have a hard time aiming due to the orbit of the earth around the sun.)
However you can cheat and power yourself toward the earth, and then there is no maximum speed.
«The "Edge of Space" jump: A corresponding fall to a schoolroom globe begins 1 millimeter above its surface. I'm just saying.» [1]
«I'm told somebody's jumping out of a perfectly good balloon from 23-miles up. The theory of gravity no longer needs to be tested in this way»[2]
Congrats to Felix and his team anyways - great endurance and a great show.
[1]: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/257591067833139200 [2]: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/255691761341587456