Extreme skydiver Baumgartner dies in paragliding accident | Hacker News Reader

Extreme skydiver Baumgartner dies in paragliding accident

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner

https://felixbaumgartner.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_Stratos

https://www.redbull.com/int-en/projects/red-bull-stratos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYw4meRWGd4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raiFrxbHxV0

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/world/europe/felix-baumga...

https://archive.today/e0OGy

I only learned recently that Felix nearly had to pull out of the jump due to claustrophobia from the suit.

After CBT he was able to tolerate the suit and complete the jump.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/skydiver-felix-baumgartner-ove...

Wearing a spacesuit, you can't scratch your nose.

You maybe don't think it's a big thing but try sitting one minute without touching your face.

I have no idea why you think this is a thing, but just in case I subconsciously tend to do this, I set a timer for 2 minutes without touching my face.

It was effortless.

Edit: wait, I've been in an MRI machine for over an hour where I can't move my arms from my side. How can you think one minute is anything?

You clearly have superhuman endurance and I bow to you.

This video says that the helmet mic serves as a decent face scratcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VCuaZCRn1U

I've also read that many astronauts put strips of adhesive Velcro in their helmet for this purpose: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/42012/nose-scratch...

At the start of the jump he started spinning out of control, but he regained it later. I always thought he just got the hang of it, but if he was claustrophobic, maybe he panicked a bit before composing himself.

    he started spinning out of control
    he regained it later.

At such high altitude, the atmosphere is so thin that controlling a spin is near impossible. Skydivers use the airflow over their body to turn / move / control their motion. If there's no atmosphere, and therefore no airflow / friction, there's no control. There weren't any thrust engines on his suit!

I always appreciate when a daredevil dies doing what he loves. Seriously, these people don’t want to die in bed. They want to live, live, live and then blink out. I’ve seen too many people withering away in hospital beds.

I guess people generally try to maximize reward per lifetime. Some people try to increase their lifetime, albeit with smaller reward per unit time (eating their spinach). A few rare people try to maximize reward per unit time, even at the cost of a longer life. Felix lived to 56, skydiving all the way. Although he died younger than the average Austrian, he probably experienced greater sum reward. I suppose the gamble is that with his lifestyle, he could have died in his teens - in which case the sum of his reward would be lower than an "eat your spinach" 80 year old.

I wonder if you could cross compare: perhaps the sum reward of Felix's 56 fun years is about the same as a Greenland shark's 400 boring years.

Oh my God, that is horrible. He was so inspiring.

He was a far right extremist…

Not a contradiction.

For some people this is inspiring.

> He lost control of the craft and crashed into a swimming pool at a coastal resort, striking a young woman who was injured on impact.

not cool

Some grace is needed, as a medical event was the root cause.

edit: unexpected unconsciousness is not a medical event?

all we know is that we became unconscious, right?

As generally people don't just nod off flying a paraglider, a medical event is extremely likely even if it has not been officially determined.

They might however "nod off" in consequence of losing control during risk-taking activities and being subjected to high Gs.

Whether "medical event" was prior to or resulted from risk-taking adventure,

and hence culpability, will await forensics I imagine. If those are possible.

That determination aside however,

risk-taking that puts others at risk (e.g., flying over other people) is morally and in many jurisdictions legally prohibited for obvious reasons.

Do you mean activities like driving a car?

I don't think that's true. I see powered paragliders out at the beach all the time, and to my knowledge that was perfectly legal as long as you are licensed properly.

I suspect that the story here is that until things went wrong nobody expected that this was a risk-taking activity in the first place (any more so than paragliding in general is). Do we have reason to believe he was doing it unsafely before disaster struck and he lost control?

Not sure the details but it seems the article was edited

> then lost control of his paraglider, crashing into a hotel pool and lightly injuring a young female employee.

Still not great, but it seems like a rush of water knocking over someone, not quite striking which sounds like it would be life threatening.

From Wikipedia:

"On 13 July 2016, Facebook deleted his fan page of 1.5 million fans. Baumgartner subsequently claimed that he must have become "too uncomfortable" for "political elites".[48]"

Because of his pro-right viewpoints. For one thing, it's slightly amusing considering Zuckerberg's own politically convenient pirouettes on politics and management. Secondly, it reminds me why the argument was very much on the mark that social media in those days absolutely did work hard to shut don all kinds of opinions that didn't fit with dominant groupthink.

It's idiotic that a famous figure should be subject to such a deletion as soon as they deviate from a specific progressive discourse, even if one disagrees with its opposite in so many ways.

Do we have a timeline of the deletion? I don't think I'm a priori convinced that he was deleted "as soon as [he deviated] from a specific progressive discourse." If anything, prior to Jan 6, 2021 (when Zuckerberg became aware that there was such a thing as aiding and abetting treason if enough political figures decided Facebook had been complicit in organizing an attempted coup), the site was permissive in the extreme; their goal was to maximize userbase to maximize revenue, and they were very loathe to ban anyone.

According to the meme: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Felix_Baumgartn...

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