Red Bull Stratos Skydive Rescheduled for today
redbullstratos.com
redbullstratos.com
It's cool no matter what, but it would be even cooler if there were some substance behind it.
If successful jumping at 120,000 feet, that means that NASA could deploy these same space suits as an exit plan for astronauts in an emergency.
What? For exit plan you need a way to slowdown astronaut from orbit first.
Those ceramic tiles have to be placed in the right alignments to dissipate heat. So we are now talking about a rigid 'suit'. So for the rigid structure we'll need reinforcements and ways to move and handle stress and structural load at high velocities - we don't want that transmitted into the human body. (We've tested supersonic velocities, but not re-entry)
The parachute will also have to expand in size to handle the extra weight. Going down this line I we soon get to a point where we may as well call the whole thing a pod and be done with it.
All of it pretty much hinges on ceramic tiles needing to be oriented and then added structural weight.
Yes, the heat from re-entry is caused by the slowing of the spacecraft's relative speed from the incredibly fast speeds of orbit, as gravity gains hold of it and pulls it even faster. If someone exited a spacecraft in space, with zero drag, and headed towards earth, they would be moving at faster than their terminal velocity and would likely burn up.
But if someone had an issue in a sub-orbital flight - or on takeoff for a space mission - bailing out could be a viable option.
(Interestingly, this is why Col. Kittinger made the jumps he made with Project Excelsior in 1960 - to test whether an astronaut with no skydiving experience in the upcoming Mercury space program could successfully escape their spacecraft in the event of an emergency during the ascent.)
There's also a lot of military applications. Most of the previous records were set by Joe Kittinger, Felix's flight communicator, in 60's as part of military research.
As an aside, we don't actually know if this truly is the first time this has been done as there's plenty of reason why the US (or even Russia perhaps) could have already done this in secret.
It is a pretty nice site, click around a bit.
The military has also looked at using suborbital rockets to transport special forces hundreds of miles in a few minutes, then deploy them high over a hotspot quickly. So it could conceivably be useful for those purposes as well. (To be clear, these are just forward-looking conceptual studies. I'm not saying the military has these vehicles ready to go or anything like that).
Lastly, these guys are innovating on spacesuits design, which has been badly needed. Only a handful of spacesuit designs have ever been built and actually used in practice, and they were built by government entities. We're talking the slowest, most ponderous development cycles imaginable. NASA is still essentially using the same spacesuits on the space station that they first used with the shuttle in the early 1980's. Think about how many gains we've made in materials since then. The more suits we can build, test in the wild, and iterate on the better.
And he landed! http://i.imgur.com/l8z0k.png
There was some issue with his heat visor, but that was resolved.
Edit: More images I screen-snapped (sorry about the low-quality, I'm sure HQ images will be out soon):
[1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3688609/ns/nbcnightlynews/t/robe...
p.s. Kittinger is 84!
Why is it that pilots, when addressing the fliers over intercom always have terrible sound quality? You'd think that airlines could afford a high-quality microphone considering the cost of the plane and the pilot's time. Air traffic control should appreciate quality audio as well.
There could be some ruggedness requirement to these microphones that takes precedence over audio quality. Maybe they must withstand decompression?
EDIT: if you're interested, you can go right here! http://www.liveatc.net/ I transcribed hours of this stuff as part of a research project. The first 4 or so hours were really rough. After that, it got easier, with the majority of issues being that seemingly one in 20 aircraft actually have horrendous audio pickup, and accents.
(edit: the feed cutting was probably just me, just saying it was an unfortunate time for it to do so)
edit 2: They just said that the problem is specifically for the visor (to prevent fogging and icing), not the whole helmet... They still haven't found out what's wrong.
Visor heat are the wires in the glass that keep it from fogging, like the rear defroster in your car.
And it seems they're not sure if the heat is broken, or just the thermometer.
Go to http://www.redbullstratos.com/live/
and open the console to run:
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Update: [Added] Go first to http://www.redbullstratos.com/live/
Update 2: Replaced tiles, with the ones from MapQuest, code for mapquest extracted from: http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/mapquest.html
Update 3: fixed little bug introduced ;) Sorry! And placed the map below the video now, so it's easier to view.
And then, when I had it almost done, they were about to start, and then, they removed the lat/lon info on the page.
Update: 4,924,693 watching now Update: 5,056,344 watching now
EDIT: nevermind, seeing him spin but regain control removed my doubt of the difficulty.
5.4M * 0.5Mbit/s = ~330 GB/s
They're probably doing a single stream to CDNs which then fan them out.
For example they put the "edge of space" at 36km (it's actually usually considered to be at ~100km), there is no explanation for such gross errors except that they want to market the crap out of this.
The jump height is just one particular point that I noticed, and it was a point where they seemed to deliberately put a lot of spin on it in a couple of places:
1) They consistently called it "edge of space". It's a lot closer to an airliners flight height than the edge of space (100km).
2) Their consistent use of fish-eye lenses for the outside imagery made it seem like you can actually see the earth's curvature, conjuring up images of space-flight.
3) Whenever he talked with Kittinger on the ground, they background animation showed a rotating earth from LEO.
Together this all seems to mislead an unsuspecting viewer into believing that he jumped from somewhere a lot higher. What's wrong with being honest about it being 39km and nowhere near space?
It seems the highest a balloon ever went was 53km. SpaceShipOne went to the 100km and it took them a lot more effort. The altitude record for jet aircraft is 37,650m, this is about the same as the height he jumped from and seems be a better comparison to me.
But there are much worse (debatable) products that spend money on really shitty ad campaigns. So this isn't really bad.
I personally respect Red Bull for having found a niche (crazy adventure sports of all sorts) and making possible whole careers in these amazing sports.
At the end of the day, not a lot of people believe you NEED Red Bull to make this jump, but thousands of kids around the world are being inspired right this minute.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/26/red-bull-raci...
They also own a NASCAR, a football and an ice hockey team.
These are deep issues to ponder about morality, touching on Ends vs. Means, although that may be OT for HN. But Felix's ambition is somewhat noble, even if RedBull's sponsorship may not be.
It is certainly a worthy project to be funded, with a significantly smaller moral compromise than in the case of tobacco companies.
Will he slow down as his altitude increases?
I keep hearing them talk about dropping ballast -- is there a danger in ascending too fast?
EDIT:
But yes, he will also slow down as he goes up. The balloon will also change shape and expand greatly in size.
Not sure about ascending too fast, I'd imagine at high speeds there's a risk of damaging the balloon due to wind.
Anyone know how long the ascent is going to last before he actually jumps?
When interviewed Kittinger said something "To all those who said Baumgartner suit would tear apart I salute you with a middle finger!" I laughed but thought it was unnecessary harsh since at some point he may enter thicker atmospheric region going 1,340km/h.
The design of aircraft are angled to near points and aircraft skin of supersonic craft are made of exotic materials to withstand thousands of degrees Celsius. I figured Mach 1 in a bulky suit thin atmosphere or not at some point something may tear, give way or heat up suddenly.
I'm going to go buy a Red Bull now.
Perhaps YouTube was buffering because of the MILLIONS of people watching this amazing event? PR mess? You've got to be kidding.
It's the fucking future, and noone is appreciating it.