Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from stratosphere, dies in Italy | Hacker News Reader

Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from stratosphere, dies in Italy

theinternational.at

118 pointssigna11102 comments

https://archive.is/2025.07.17-234516/https://www.theinternat...

Red Bull athletes list: https://www.redbull.com/us-en/athletes

The dead ones appear to have been removed from the list, and from all other mentions on the website. Quickly, too. Somebody's got that in their job description.

I no longer find it entertaining to watch sports where there is such a high risk of death, or lifelong impairment, from brain injuries, for example. I used to love ski movies. But too many of the people in the credits are dead now.

Apart from things like unconscionable contracts, I wouldn't restrain people from extreme sports. I'm sure a lot of of them die in their beds. I just don't find it entertaining to watch.

I feel that Penn explained this incredibly well in one of my favourite magic tricks:

https://youtu.be/Jko5BGhc-Ys?si=Uz6jvQ5voEYAxg8W

We have such a weird relationship with the spectacle of risk. As he says, a tightrope act is just as difficult at any height. The only need to make it dangerous is because the audience wants the circus.

And I think somewhat implicit in the point he’s making is that he believes that while the audience wants the spectacle, the performers have a responsibility not to give it to them.

> a tightrope act is just as difficult at any height

Well, sort of. But surely part of the feat is overcoming the natural fear of heights.

That’s true. But I don’t think anyone in the audience is being wowed by that detail.

That's exactly what they're wowed by. The general audience cares about the risk-taking, the bravery and daring aspect of it, and maybe the visual flashiness. It's the psychology that's interesting to a general audience because that's what they relate to. Technical excellence is always something peers are more interested in than spectators, your ordinary viewer isn't invested in the technical proficiency of tightrope footwork.

There's 3 distinct things:

A) The ability of walking a tightrope

B) The ability of overcoming your fears to the extent of being able to walk a tightrope at a dangerous height

C) The risk of falling

I would argue that the audience cares about A and C. The audience doesn't care so much for B.

I think the audience largely just cares about C.

I would not be surprised if most lay people don't know why or how it's even that hard, or what goes into training. "Oh, it's just someone who has good balance" vs an awareness of the technical details of physical fitness.

Having watched a few of Cirque du Soleil's shows, I can confirm that A is much more impressive and exciting than C.

Sure, there's risk, but seeing how effortless they make it look is amazing. The skill to do it fearlessly is far more impressive than the fact that something bad didn't happen. Audience members expect that it won't happen. There's a visceral reaction, of course, but that's it.

Completely agreed. I think the first time you go with some friends to an olympic diving board, it's the exact same thing. When you look at it from the ground it's "only" 10m, it doesn't feel so scary. But when you get up there and look down, zomg is 10m friggin high! Oh and the climb up there... It's high enough that by the time you reach the platform you've completely dried off.

It's completely safe and trivial to do, but awesome nonetheless, and a show for your friends, just because it's really scary the first time you do it!

This reminded me of an old Dave Chappelle joke about the Siegfried & Roy tiger show (around 1:10 min mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kth0UOU5a_M

> As he says, a tightrope act is just as difficult at any height. The only need to make it dangerous is because the audience wants the circus.

Tho, only a few of the people who engage in these dangerous sports are famous or earn money on that. As in, if you look at those sports, there are always people who seek the danger and possible self destruction. They do it, because they want to do them. Not because of the audience.

Personally I much prefer watching a tightrope act when I’m not constantly worried about the performers dying.

There's a level of economic coercion involved though as well - "going pro" is only possible by pushing for riskier and riskier stunts. If you want to get paid to ski, skateboard, etc you need to be doing increasingly extreme things to risk your own health and safety. The companies do lots of risk mitigation once you're filming a TV spot, but to get to that level you already had to be putting your body on the line for years.

The ethical thing is to refuse to be complicit by refusing to watch.

Everyone knows the risk. Especially if you get to the level of Redbull Athlete. We all accept it. We'd rather live a full life doing what we want vs the inverse. You dont have to support it but don't demean the people that choose that path. Everyone is the manifest of their own destiny. These folks are stewards of the sports and the potential that is there.

Money affects these decisions. Same as it does for prostitutes. Regulate accordingly.

There is way less money in this sport than you think there is.

> We'd rather live a full life doing what we want vs the inverse

Except these people have families that care about them, you could even say kids need a parent in their life.

The day Honnold falls to his death the world will applaud all his achievements but his kid probably wish his dad never climbed at all.

The day I became a father is the day I stopped riding a motorbike.

Does MMA or boxing count to you? They are violent sports with risk of brain damage.

Risk? Are there are known professional fighters without brain damage at the end of their carrier?

Afaik not even bob-racers have that luxury

I don't know. Because even in training they take lots of punches to the head.

I guess some leave the fighting game with more pronounced damage than others.

Boxing should be illegal. There are fighting arts that don't include full contact much less knocking your opponent out or otherwise damaging them, often leaving residual permanent damage. I've never found boxing entertaining at all.

Slightly misleading title. He's famous for first to jump from the stratosphere, breaking the sound barrier. That wasn't the cause of his death. More on him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner .

Maybe a more interesting and impressive fact from the wiki is learning about Alan Eustace, who was a senior VP of engineering at Google. Just before retiring, on October 24, 2014 *at age 57*, he made a free-fall jump from the stratosphere, breaking Felix Baumgartner's world record. He won the Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year in 2015.

Found HN post (236 comments) on Alan Eustace breaking the record: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8504931

He only did it once he knew it was possible. And different mechanism (that most people wont understand). While yes he beat the record. Felix did it first.

At the Air & Space Museum in DC there's a little exhibit for each of them right across from each other.

He is a legend in the sport. He deserves that title.

If you die on your first parachute jump, you're unlucky.

If you live your entire life doing these "small chance each time" stunts, maybe we should not be so surprised that your eventual demise was this kind of thing.

Was an interesting character, RIP.

Definitely a true statement, but reports are saying he was already unconscious as he fell, so some open questions remain

Not that I doubt the reports, but how could anyone possibly make that call?

Yes. A pathologist can know if there was a catasthropic event like the natural rupture of an artery (e.g. stroke, heart attack) In vivo events evolve differently than post mortem ones, e.g. strangling a dead body shows differently than strangling a person to death.

More recently, he might have been wearing a vital signal monitor that kept logs.

Nowadays probably the latter.

Someone so famous and regularly doing spectacular things surely have a bunch of sensors attached to them that reports a bunch of metrics about their physiological state.

Well if "unconscious" happens to you in a restaurant you don't fall out of the sky.

The final result is often similar while driving. Or walking down a flight of stairs, at least for oneself.

No it's not. In both examples you are very likely to survive. This is different than the ~0% chance of survival Felix had in the air.

Tens of thousands die falling on stairs every year. You don't have to fall out of the sky to die. Just last year a good friend of mine had to bury her sister because she fell while exiting her car. You are more likely to survive than in small aviation crashes but most people (probably Felix included) spend way more time on that than flying. As a motorcyclist I'm surely not well of either when I suddenly fall unconscious.

There are many activities where you really should not pass out while doing them, but they don't make for interesting headlines.

"Many people die from X" is different than "you will most likely die if you X".

Most people who pass out in vehicles probably survive. Say we ignore the cases where you're on a side street, stuck in traffic, going at slow speeds, etc. (and just end up idling in the road with people honking/routing around you) -- so just consider the deadliest case, going at speed on the highway. While there aren't statistics for this particular scenario, we can look at the numbers for multi-car collisions in general, as that's near to the worst thing that could happen if you did just stop managing your car while at speed (gliding into the median is much less likely to be fatal): https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/.... One line in the report suggests this should be broadly comparable to what we're thinking of: "In about 40 percent of fatal single vehicle rollovers and 57 percent of multi- vehicle rollovers, investigating officers reported that no crash avoidance maneuvers preceded the crash".

Even still: the fatality rate is <10%!

Compare to >80% if you pass out while doing underwater cave diving.

There's a concept I read about before called micromorts, where activities are given a danger rating something like the expected number of fatalities per million events.

So riding a motorbike 100 miles is 8 micromorts.

Hang-gliding is 9 micromorts.

Base jumping is 430 micromorts.

And summiting Everest is 37,000 micromorts.

Incidentally, of those - I know of two guys who died either on Everest or at base camp there over the past 15 years. First guy fell on the descent, and the second guy developed health issues at altitude (apparently related to an Israeli team immediately prior stealing their oxygen bottles).

I try to calibrate risk based on the likelihood of dying during my commute. I'm glad that there is a more standardized scale!

Is there anything you do that ends up being more dangerous? Genuinely curious

I often think about this while riding my bicycle to work. The exercise and quiet time surely has a positive impact on my health span, but being among cars risking collision and breathing in exhaust is a negative. What’s the net result?

Well if you commuted by riding 100 miles per day on a motorbike for 40 years your total risk is roughly 77,000 micromorts (77 millimorts?), or double the risk of summiting Everest once!

> summiting Everest is 37,000 micromorts

That's only 3.7 % — I imagined it was higher.

Does the death rate of 'summiting' include those who die before they reach the top? or those that abandon an attempt and survive?

Everest is such a well-known target, they have helpers and there’s a whole system, right? I vaguely think I’ve seen photos of a line at the top…

I think it is somewhat commercialized. Actually, I’m surprised the death rate is that high. I wonder if it is pulled up by people who aren’t really ready, because it is so popular. FWIW,

https://www.climbing-kilimanjaro.com/mount-kilimanjaro-death...

> Approximately 50,000 people ascend Mount Kilimanjaro every year. According to Kilimanjaro travel guides and recorded statistics, on average 3 to 10 people die each year. It is widely believed that the actual number could be two to three times higher, although these estimates are not substantiated by reliable data.

The main killer in the Himalayas are avalanches, and the route to Mt. Everest summit is somewhat predictable in this regard. There was a terrible avalanche in 2015 that swept the base camp and killed almost twenty people, but most of the time, nothing like that happens.

The more deadly mountains like K2, Nanga Parbat and Annapurna, are prone to avalanches that cannot be avoided by taking a specific route. Or icefalls. A couloir called the Bottleneck is a major killer on the K2 route. You have to traverse a very exposed terrain there to get to the top, and a majority of K2 deaths have happened there.

Nothing like that on the standard Everest route. The Khumbu icefall or the Hillary step are challenging, but nowhere near as treacherous.

I feel like you want some higher moments on these. At least the standard deviation would be useful on top of the expectation.

probability is memoryless.

If you have been base jumping for 20 years, you have the same risk on your next jump as someone trying it for the first time.

Yes but you’re answering the wrong question. It’s not, “what is the probability of death on my next jump?”. It’s “what is the accumulated probability of death by jumping repeatedly.”

The way you answer it is by flipping it upside down (what is the probability of surviving a single jump?) and multiplying that value by itself n times, where n is the number of jumps.

.99999 * .99999 * .99999 * …

That’s only if you are planning to jump 100 more times.

A lot more than 2 people die on Everest per year according to Wikipedia and I’m sure oxygen bottle theft plays a role but I haven’t read anything attributing deaths to “Israeli team stealing oxygen bottles”.

Mind sharing where you got these news from?

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

Wild, is that really accurate for base jumping? I've met a number of base jumpers (there's some overlap with the climbing community where I live) and several of them have subsequently died jumping. I guess they probably jump a lot more than I think?

also with time they get more cocky? While new drivers have a higher crash rate in their first year of driving, the fatality rate is actually highest in their second year, not their first.

My 4-year-old daughter asks to watch his Red Bull Stratos jump almost every night before bed. She's obsessed with space because of him and says "Felix is my favorite astronaut." May he continue to inspire.

My son was literally asking me about him yesterday. Wonder how many kids think about him every day.

Austrian newspaper Der Standard [1] is reporting that he was using a camera attached with a string, and authorities are considering the possiblity that it got caught in the propellor, leading to a collapse of the parachute.

Allegedly he tried to open the emergency chute, but was already too low.

[1]: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000280134/justiz-in-ita...

I’m the a moon’s distance away from a being a pro athlete or pushing any adventure sports field I participate in, but I do things for fun that some people think are insanely dangerous. I’ve toned it back now that I have kids (which changed my thinking) but for a long time I would have been quite happy with that exit from life. Doing something I loved, never put through indignity of advanced age, dying quickly and without suffering.

God speed Felix

I used to walk across pitched roofs 3-floors up as a teen, and squeeze between cars and busses on my bike in narrow london roads (back before bike lanes were a thing) to the point that I would routinely get to my job with bloodied knuckles.

At the time I was clearly just vibing off the adrenaline, but looking back on it all as mature adult... I get heart palpatations.

There are many parallel worlds where I am not alive, and I think of those other selves often.

I feel like humans must be naturally better at surviving these things when young. I see kids doing this stuff every day. Not walking on pitched roofs, but plenty of other stuff that could get them killed if something goes wrong.

My risk habits have a rather low chance of dying per injury event, but life changing injury isn't all that rare. I do occasionally see myself envying those with a risk profile that's more on the binary end of the spectrum: where it's either a clean end or everything is fine.

>Illness

Unreviewed translation of "Unwohlseins"

Other media hint at seizure/cardiac arrest.

"feeling unwell" would be the more direct and more correct translation

I wouldn't agree, it's a big step beyond just feeling unwell. With this word I would think someone might need medical assistance.

Thanks, also got confused by this

> Baumgartner lost control of his motorized paraglider due to a sudden illness and crashed into a hotel pool.

He may have died while paragliding rather than from paragliding.

A heart attack or stroke could have been the actual cause of death

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596845

I watched him jump live, that was incredibly cool and spooky when he started tumbling. I won't forget that

It was not transmitted live, but with a suitable delay. They would not have shown it in case.

Here in Austria he was a very controversial person cause of his stance on democracy, right wing views and conflicts with Austrian journalists.

He should have come to live in the US, he would have been welcome in the current administration.

He sure would have been welcome as a tax avoider

Reminds me of Yuri Gagarin, first man in space who later died in a plane crash..

And me of Francis Gary Powers.

First man who returned from space alive

No man, dead or alive, returned from space before him

They are either thinking of Vladimir Komarov (who died during Soyuz 1, in 1967 - six years after Gagarin's orbit, for whom Gagarin was the backup crew) or referencing the conspiracy theory that the Soviets tried a couple times to orbit a human, covered up initial failures, and only made Gagarin's success public because it worked.

Afaik there's not any evidence of this. The Soviets did have a bent towards secrecy so it's plausible, I guess, but it's definitely more the realm of creepypasta ("there could be dozens of old Soviet capsules in orbit with corpses inside!") than historical fact.

I was just watching his jump again last week. Was surprised to find his record only stood for a couple of years before someone went higher in a much less media-covered jump.

2 years later by a Google guy without much media circus

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

Eustace went higher, but did not freefall -- he had a parachute to slow his descent. Baumgartner was in freefall. Different categories.

Curious parallel to Gary Powers: the man who fell from the stratosphere in a shot down U2 and later in life died crash landing into a populated area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Gary_Powers#Death

>Austrian extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner (56) died on Thursday afternoon in a paragliding accident

quite a legacy

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596845

AP says it was a paraglider crash.

The bystanders, and especially the poor woman who was injured in the accident, have for sure lived a traumatizing experience.

Fortunately, from what I read, the woman, a hotel employee who was struck by debris from the poolside wooden hut where Baumgartner crashed, is expected to make a full recovery. I hope she is not afflicted by any lingering health or financial problems.

I haven’t seen any indication that Baumgartner was paragliding in a forbidden area. My understanding is that restrictions on paragliding are a patchwork, from licensing and insurance requirements to where you are allowed to fly.

Such a shame. People who have met him have always said he was a stand up guy.

Definitely a man who pursued his passions.

RIP.

Definitely caused some controversy in recent years aswell, like recommending Orban for the peace nobel prize. Literally the man that turned Hungary into the poorest and most illiberal EU country. But again, Baumgartner prefers dictatorships to democracy.

*preferred…

At least they maintained communism, even if officially it stopped being communist, it was still de facto communist and that's why it became so poor. Don't think of them as poor but as equal outcome.

What on Earth are you talking about?

Yeah I starved to death, but at least we all died equally starved!

Equality of outcome is the cruelest lie the untalented, lazy, and comfortable tell each other. They assume it means raising the bar to their level instead of drawing it on the ground. It's enforced mediocrity, peddled by those who fear effort and resent excellence.

If for you outcome is the same why you would prefer capitalism over socialism or communism? only because small group of rich people will be in more good? But if it doesn't affect you in any way, and maybe it will make it worse, there will be no point in it.

Equal outcome? Like 99% of power in Hungary is split between Orban and his uni dorm buddies. The guy doesn't even have any ideology, just loves power, money and football. Used to be bearded liberal left wing, turned gelled hair far right after the first thing didn't pull any voters. Didn't care about immigrants until the far far right party got some votes on the issue and then started leaning in heavily.

Communism in Hungary was introduced and kept up by Soviets after the 2nd ww. The very considerable difference between Orban and Kadar (the longest serving communist leader) is that Kadar paid attention not to make his direct family and direct friend the most exorbitantly rich guys in 15 years, which probably also made lots of mid-income people poorer in Hungary. And despite very strong democratic backsliding in many areas, it is still more democratic than during Soviet-led times. But that's probably not due to Mr Orban's character or self-restraint. Baumgartner's idea is probably related to fashionable libertarian ideas of those rich people who never had the patience to feel sympathy for other people, nor to study history or humanities, but feel like they should have a say.

I remember Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize not even a year into his first term, with no concrete peace-related achievements under his belt. There are also Kissinger, Abiy Ahmed and Yasser Arafat on the list of laureates. Overall, it might be the weakest of the Prizes, in the "too dependent on momental popularity and political pressure" sense.

The scientific Nobels + Literature are usually awarded with a decent time gap after the relevant achievement, which helps. Maybe the Nobel Peace Prize should only be awarded to professionally retired people over 70. That would prevent it from being too politicized.

(Shimon Peres too in list of questionable peace laureates)

The over 70 criteria wouldn't help much nowadays, with basically every leader being in his 70s+ (Trump, Biden, Xi, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Khomeini, Putin, etc.)

op said

> professionally retired people over 70

You have your information from the corporate media.

As far as Hungary's development of the GDP per capita is concerned your statement is wrong.

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

Quod Darwin demonstrandum.

R.I.P.

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