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Comment by mittermayr | Hacker News Reader

GIF of the first five seconds or so http://images.4chan.org/sp/src/1350238600230.gif

That link will expire once the thread 404s and imgur does not accept files over 2MB so here is an alt link from tinypic: http://i47.tinypic.com/30vllw6.jpg

min.us is a good alternative to imgur when it comes to large gifs.

I wish the GIF started a few seconds before that, Felix finishes his speech and salutes, then walks forward.

That moment gave me chills

I couldn't imagine the guts it would take to stand on that platform, much less calmly step off.

If you've ever gone skydiving, you'll know that once you have trust in the technology that deploys the canopy, you can get fairly blase about the exit. Also, the height becomes sort of abstract above a certain level - even at 3000 feet, the world below doesn't look particularly real, it looks like a very detailed model with cute little moving cars and stuff.

i confirm

I haven't gone skydiving, so maybe you know better than I do, but wasn't this exit more perilous than most? He had to leave the platform with as little spin as possible since there wasn't enough atmosphere for him to control his descent.

Or maybe they just hyped the danger to make people keep watching?

> He had to leave the platform with as little spin as possible since there wasn't enough atmosphere for him to control his descent.

Maybe that's why he seemed so calm?

I totally can understand how that would be the case. But I find it hard to believe that the experience might not be just a little bit different when you are looking across the top of the atmosphere, waiting to hit Mach 1 and hoping you won't spin like a rag-doll until the G forces shred your internals.

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...

9.8m/s^2 at work.

The gravitational acceleration is equal to G * M/r^2 where G is the gravitational constant (G = 6.67 * 10^(-11) N * m^2/kg^2) M is the mass of Earth (M = 5.97 * 10^24 kg) and r is the radius of the Earth (average radius = 6.37 * 10^6 m).

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.

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