He failed breaking the record for longest free fall duration.
If he will get a second chance to do that?
If he will get a second chance to do that?
Edit: Here's a cool altitude graph for Mir: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:MirOrbitalMan...
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...
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.
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.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/oct/14/felix-baumgartne...