Skydiver shatters world record with 24-mile leap
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
«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
If he was standing on that little ledge: "The theory of gravity definitely no longer needs to be tested this way. Now let me back in!"
That doesn't even make sense.
You're just being needlessly and nonsensically indignant over a joke from a guy who is hardly unaccomplished himself [1].
Chill out.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson#Selected_aw...
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.
We don't need hours of analysis and arguing over what he possibly may have meant by his tweet.
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
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.
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.
No, I guess you're right. I'm an idiot.
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.
Seriously, until a man launches himself from the thermosphere, you can colour me unimpressed.
What about the Apollo missions?
You can thank Space Camp for that :)
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 :-)
And you can probably thank the Red Bull marketing teams for that, it's their job to spread exactly that hype, even if it's completely dishonest.
The man is not without accomplishments, but it's getting to the point of complete over-saturation. Just enough already.
[1] http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd
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.
Exit altitude:
128,100 ft
39,045 m
4m:20s
119,846 ft
36,529 m
373 m/s
1,342.8 km/h
833.9 mph
Mach 1.24There 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.
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).
-- This is interesing, Thanks.
Do we know at what altitude he hit Mach 1.0, out of curiousity?
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.
How appropriate - the speed of an Austrian skydiver measured in a unit named after an Austrian physicist!
"Load more comments" and "comment score below threshold" ... we have the technology ...
Avoid unnecessary editing of the article's original title.
(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.)
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.
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.
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?
And it wasn't even "just" a joke, finding out there was actually a grain of truth to that classic, I felt worth pointing it out.
A capsule is small and heavy, so it'll have enough inertia to push up the compression and hence reentry heat.
The only things that need to come back are the astronauts.
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:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballute
But it would probably need to be so large as to be impractical.
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.
Also, if the shuttle had actually been used as much as intended the cost wouldn't have been nearly as much.
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.
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.
This isn't wishful thinking either -- both have already done some initial low altitude VTVL tests. Videos here:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/22/spacexs-grasshopper-verti...
http://www.blueorigin.com/updates/updates-2011-11-17-video-o...
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.
I actually got teary eyed when he landed and fell to his knees. Such a huge leap for the space program.
* 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.
- Both.
That moment gave me chills
Or maybe they just hyped the danger to make people keep watching?
Maybe that's why he seemed so calm?
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.
Someday...
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.
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.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger [2]: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/255691761341587456
My heart skipped a beat or two!
If he will get a second chance to do that?
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.
Like mountaineers who turn back before reaching the summit, because they know that getting there is only part of the effort.
Well done, Felix. On all accounts!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's his account of the incident: http://www.barthworks.com/aviation/sr71breakup.htm
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.)
"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)."
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.
Definitely an interesting question, though.
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. :)
You sir, have high expectations.
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.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+at+10000...
Edit: Here's a cool altitude graph for Mir: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:MirOrbitalMan...
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/oct/14/felix-baumgartne...
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.
Is there a video of his on-man camera view?
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.
Edit: Thanks to both replies. Never mind, then!
If you just keep going straight up you'll eventually fall back to Earth, or be on your own independent orbit around the Sun.
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.
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.