Felix Baumgartner: The best photos and videos from the edge of space | Hacker News Reader

Felix Baumgartner: The best photos and videos from the edge of space

extremetech.com

110 pointsulrichkautz51 comments

Does anyone know the specification of what makes the difference between a person free falling and a person in a vehicle free falling?

I know this seems specific, but lets say for example the space suit is completely ridged, and made out of metal, would he still qualify?

I'm basically trying to figure out exactly what the point of gear is that moves it from skydive to vehicular fall.

I would consider that difference is primarily power assistance. A vehicle would probably provide power assistance in propelling the motion whereas a free fall is 100% propelled by the gravity.

Using that criteria, every reentry vehicle including the Space Shuttle would be a "sky dive". I searched on the web and couldn't come up with a good definition, but I'm sure one exists.

This guy is using a pressurized suit, so it just doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to single person capsule.

However, the shuttle enters the descent carrying over the momentum from its rockets during the launch. The balloon was roughly at rest, rather than in orbit.

What if he used a balloon with a capsule attached and just released the capsule? By that definition that would be a sky dive, but it still doesn't seem like a sky dive.

I think your description would still count as a "suit" since it would accomodate for individual body parts (leg, arms, etc).

I think once there's area for movement within the suit, it would become a "vehicle."

It's also worth noting that the suit stil uses Felix' skeleton as the main anchor object – it's what is sustaining the pressure when the canopy releases whereas a vehicle would use it's skeleton to deploy the chute.

Not a complete success: One high-altitude balloon record is ...This discrepancy is likely caused by the fact that Baumgartner achieved significantly higher speeds than Kittinger, and so the free fall phase ended quicker than expected.

This discrepancy is likely caused by Felix showing great respect for Joe by allowing him to keep one record.

I'm not saying that Felix didn't intentionally deploy his chute early to preserve that last record but here are a few points to consider:

Right before Felix deployed his chute he complained that he had poor visibility because his visor had fogged up. He had been having trouble with the heating element on his visor before the he made the jump as well. So it is possible he made the decision to deploy for safety reasons if he wasn't able to accurately gauge his altitude due to poor visibility.

Lastly, in the Project Excelsior jump Kittinger used a drogue to slow and stabilize his descent. This is at odds with what Felix was trying to accomplish which was to break the sound barrier and achieve the fastest free fall record. So, the difference in speeds between Kittinger and Felix may have been enough to prevent Felix from also beating the longest free fall record.

In the press conference Felix stated that he pulled at 5200 feet, which was the planned deployment altitude (well, 5000 was planned, but the 200 feet difference is negligible at 170+mph).

So that solves it then. That would mean that he did not pull early to preserve Kittinger's record as many people were suggesting. He simply was going too fast and Kittinger had gone too slow (especially because of the drogue).

Total distance in free-fall is a better record, then, than total time.

In order to have broken Kittinger's record Baumgartner would have had to fall for an additional 16 seconds. At 170 mph (250 ft/s) or so that would have translated into falling an additional 4,000 feet, and deploying his parachute at a height of only about 1,000 feet within 4 seconds of impact.

Moreover, his reserve parachute would have automatically deployed at a height of 2,000 feet, which would have left him about 4 seconds short of the record regardless.

The records of "fastest free fall speed" and "longest free fall" are diametrically opposed to each other. They said multiple times that they were going for height and speed. I think the "longest free fall" was sort of a "bonus" one they were thinking might be possible if he didn't break the sound barrier.

Can anyone help me transcribe the altitude, time, and velocity data from the bbc coverage of this jump? I'm planning on creating an animated JavaScript infographic using d3. I'm starting at the top of his jump and planning on trying to sample at 5 sec intervals by pausing the video and writing down the data. If anyone wants to start at the bottom of the freefall and work up, that would be great. My main goal is to get the freefall data -- after the chute deploys is not as important.

I'll post it here as csv once its transcribed.

EDIT: This is taking forever; I'm going to use Mechanical Turk. I'll post here when done.

This is what was produced by mechanical Turk, so I can't completely vouch for its accuracy. However, I think it's probably pretty correct. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of data points available from the video transmission during the ~4:00 jump.

https://gist.github.com/3896312

In the unlikely event that anyone checks back, I'm holding off on making the visualization until the Felix Baumgartner team (hopefully) releases the official data, which would ideally include his vitals during the jump. There just aren't enough data points here to make an interesting visualization. I could extrapolate everything, but that's not the kind of visualization I have in mind. So I'll cross my fingers and hope the team releases the data in the coming days.

Although he haven't broke longest free-fall by time, he broke the record of longest free-fall by distance. Baumgartner opened parachute after 36 529 meters[1] of free fall, breaking the record of Yevgeni Andreyev from 1962 by something over eleven kilometers (24 500m)[2].

I yet have to see an article reporting on this. I only stumbled upon this information when browsing related wikipedia articles yesterday while watching the quite boring ascent.

1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9607604/Skydiver-Fe...

2. http://www.fai.org/record-parachuting category Freefall distance

NOTE: While searching for some reliable source I've found that he only broke his own record today, and that the Soviet record was broken in July. That's why no article mentions it... I'll leave this comment here as it is still interesting.

They didn't try very hard to show a realistic earth curvature. sigh Now every non-geek thinks he actually jumped from as high as, say, the ISS, instead of 10% of that.

I've already seen the non-specialized press pointing out how clearly the earth curvature is visible in the pictures - but it's highly exaggerated by a fish-eye lens!

I wonder how easy it would be to just apply a transform that reverses the fish-eye effect. If the source video were high quality enough it might be pretty interesting.

It's a standard feature on e.g. Adobe After Effects. I hope someone will do it!

The commentator on the live feed did reiterate several times that the exaggerated curvature was due to the lens, I guess the press just decided to ignore that.

It was a big marketing event after all. The extra curvature probably adds to the hyper-realism and makes people all the more excited about the campaign.

I can't imagine how hard it would be to force myself to take that one step between life and death. Bravo!

Would it matter if it's 30 kilometer or 3? If anything goes wrong you're dead. I found it surprisingly easy to jump out of a plane at 3000 meters (3 km) after just a 5 minute training on the ground. The feeling of falling is super! The chute deploying? Not so much! (If you're ever planning this do not wear jeans).

"The chute deploying? Not so much! (If you're ever planning this do not wear jeans)." Why not?

I've done a few skydives so I can speak from experience - the rig that your canopy / emergency reserve is attached to resembles a giant backpack with a chest strap, and two straps that go around your thighs, and when you deploy the main canopy, you will feel the rig exerting a braking force on your chest, shoulders, and thighs. It's a lot like slamming on the brakes in your car at 60mph+. If your jeans are too tight-fitting you may get a rash, or it may just be really uncomfortable.

You're right. When the parachute deployed the jerk was unlike anything I ever experienced. The straps around my thighs rammed the loose-fit jeans against my thighs and the thicker stiched part of the jeans made for a few blue "souveneers" on my skin.

I can tell you that's not the usual experience. I don't have a whole lot of experience, but I do have nearly 300 jumps and I'm still yet to experience a hard opening. Much more like coming to a slow, graceful stop in the car. People sometimes have a "slammer" but they're rare and can usually be attributed to some reason (bad packing, bad body position at deploy time etc).

At 13 jumps I have even less experience :)

The parent may have been doing a tandem jump; in my experience, the openings on those first few were much harder than most solo jumps I've done.

Edit: from reading the parent's other posts, perhaps not. Maybe it was a hard opening on a day he/she happened to be wearing denim. Who knows :)

Yes I did! I'm the guy with he black hair. Jumping with the No1 jumper from Holland. http://i.imgur.com/3beyM.jpg Everybody should do it at least once! It is incredibly cool.

Yep, and if not tandem could have been rental gear. Although I've never had a hard opening on any gear, the rental gear I jumped as a student was a lot less comfortable than my rig that's sized perfectly for me.

Congrats on the 13 jumps! Where do you jump at?

Sorry, I just saw your post! HN really needs a notification system a la Reddit :)

I jump out of Crosskeys in Williamstown, NJ, USA. The airport code is 17N. How about yourself?

"I don't have a whole lot of experience, but I do have nearly 300 jumps"

300? I take my hat of for you sir! I must of had a bad day. It was very cloudy and the plane we jumped from ended up above the wrong island. We found out in time, corrected, found a hole in the clouds and went for it.

Opening speeds vary a lot, some are very hard and some are very soft. It's dependent on a lot of variables, with a lot of randomness thrown in. You probably just had the fortune of having a hard one. :)

Hell with the whole idea of getting out of the gondola, its getting in the damn thing in the first place that would have stopped me.

Fair point. But when I jump from 3 km, I bask in the knowledge that plenty of people have done it in the past and landed alive (not that it says anything about how _my_ jump will go). But jumping from 30km, I know that no one else has done it.

No idea how many people died when skydiving began, but I'm guessing there were a few deaths, and I would hate to be part of a similar statistic. Having said that, skydiving is definitely on my list of things to do before 2014.

The fatality rate per participant is a lot lower now than it was in the beginning "It used to be referred to as sport death", but it's still about 13 - 30 a year. Mostly due to accidents involving landing and other entirely preventable things.

I almost ended up in those statistics. The ropes of my chute got tangled up when it deployed. Thankfully they untangled in time :-) Got in on video too, ha ha.

One small step for mankind, one giant leap for Felix.

And energy drink marketing!

I was slightly disappointed that "drink a refreshing can of Red Bull" wasn't on the pre-jump checklist.

Are these photos artificially curved / lens-angled (perhaps intentionally deceptive?), making the Earth appear more curved and the altitude appear higher than it would to a human observer at the camera's position?

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/felix- baumgartner-jumps-from-red-bull-stratos-balloon-640x353.jpg

Does anyone know what (will/has) happen(ed) to the pod? Presumably at some altitude, the helium balloon will expand to the point of "popping", and down comes the pod--or am I mistaken?

Assuming the pod falls down, and isn't controlled, isn't that "just a tad" dangerous?

There is a mechanism for tearing the helium envelope which causes the capsule to fall, at some point parachutes are released and the capsule makes a soft landing and is recovered.

I'm looking forward to the hi-res images when Red Bull has finally processed them and gotten them up. The video is spectacular to watch again as well.

Came here to say the same thing.

This is the kit they had in the capsule:

* Nine high-definition cameras

* Three 4K (4,000 x 2,000-pixel) digital cinematography cameras

* Three high-resolution digital still cameras

* Three small high-definition video cameras: one on each thigh and one on Felix's chest pack

( From http://www.redbullstratos.com/technology/cameras-communicati... )

"A BBC/National Geographic documentary is being made about the project. This will probably air first in the UK and in the US in November, .." - so I guess they will have a lot more cool pics. (BBC Website)

Does anyone know what will happen to that balloon hanging in there at Stratosphere?

Without the weight of the capsule it will rise up and burst, at the press conference there was a mention of recovering the balloon after it lands.

Typically they blow a hole in the side when the capsule is released to parachute down. Generally the balloon lands not too far from the payload.

All that for being mentioned in the same breath as Neil Armstrong..

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