Why did felix baumgartner

With that, I can get an estimate for the acceleration of his head due to the spinning motion not due to gravity - since you don't really feel that force. Remember that if an object his head is moving in a circle, it does accelerate even if moving at a constant speed.

This is because the direction of motion for the head has to change in order to move in a circle. With an angular acceleration of 7. From what I can guess, that wouldn't be much fun. Also, this since his head is accelerating towards his center of mass there would be a fake centrifugal force pushing blood towards his head. According to Wikipedia's page on G-force tolerance , a person can only take about -3 g's before a red out. This is where excess blood pressure in the capillaries causes vision problems.

Like I said before, it is fortunate that he controlled his spin before it went on for too long or perhaps even spun faster. Just for fun, let's look at the trajectory of the image.

So, as Felix falls the camera tracks him. Of course, the camera doesn't do a perfect job - if it did, the x-y coordinate of Felix in the frame wouldn't change. Felix was born in , but his journey truly began at the age of 16, when he completed his first ever skydive. The thrill sucked him in and he continued to challenge himself with extreme parachuting. He soon took up BASE jumping, another seriously dangerous sport that involves parachuting or wingsuit flying from a fixed structure or cliff.

Felix went on to join the Austrian military, where he spent many years perfecting his parachute jumping and learned how to land on small target zones. They refused him, but a determined Felix went on to do the stunt regardless. The concept was always the same.

It took years of unthinkably expensive research, development and testing with industry experts to perfect the equipment. Felix hated the restrictive suit that was designed for him so much that a psychologist was brought in to help him come to terms with being inside it. This was enough helium for lift off, but did not fill the balloon envelope to capacity because they needed to leave space to allow the helium to expand while the balloon rose. He was supposed to get himself into a delta position - head down, arms swept back - as soon as possible after leaving his capsule.

But the video showed him tumbling over and over. Eventually, however, he was able to use his great experience, from more than 2, career dives, to correct his fall and get into a stable configuration.

Even before this drama, it was thought the mission might have to be called off. As he went through last-minute checks inside the capsule, it was found that a heater for his visor was not working. This meant the visor fogged up as he exhaled. The team took a calculated risk to proceed after understanding why the problem existed. Baumgartner's efforts have finally toppled records that have stood for more than 50 years.

Kittinger set his marks for the highest, farthest, and longest freefall when he leapt from a helium envelope in His altitude was ,ft 31km.

His record for the longest freefall remains intact - he fell for more than four and a half minutes before deploying his chute; Baumgartner was in freefall for four minutes and 20 seconds. Kittinger, now an octogenarian, has been an integral part of Baumgartner's team, and has provided the Austrian with advice and encouragement whenever the younger man has doubted his ability to complete such a daring venture. The year-old adventurer - best known for leaping off skyscrapers - first discussed seriously the possibility of beating Kittinger's records in Since then, he has had to battle technical and budgetary challenges to make it happen.

What he was proposing was extremely dangerous, even for a man used to those skyscraper stunts. However much they liked him personally and enjoyed his company over beers, they had found him to be difficult to work with—stubborn, self-dramatizing, smart yet intellectually insecure, strangely disengaged from the science behind the project, and emotionally unpredictable.

He was certainly not the cool, well-educated test-pilot type they normally dealt with. He once abandoned the project in the midst of a tight schedule, went to the airport in tears, and flew home to Austria. One would expect Joseph Kittinger in particular to have disdained him for this: Kittinger the high-altitude pioneer; the three-tour combat pilot in Vietnam, who ejected in excess of Mach 1 when his F-4 was hit by an enemy missile; the prisoner of war who was tortured by his captors and still hates Jane Fonda; the adventurer who, after his air-force career, became the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in a balloon.

Kittinger is not the type to abandon anything in a state of emotional distress. But as it turned out, it was Kittinger, more than any other team member, who could accommodate Baumgartner as a man. The launch was flawless. 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.