Alan Eustace Jumps from Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s World Record
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So 12.5 mph, a little faster than the average bicycle pace. Straight up.
Works with other engineers in secret for 3 years to knock out a badass space survival suit.
And then, just for us kids, "cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device . . ." and achieves 800mph+, setting off a "small sonic boom".
I !@%! love engineers.
I have no college education. I can weld (quite well), I've built 3d models for laser sintering, I've assembled carbon fiber body panels. If you want to do something, learn how to do it. Then go do it!
But I've long wondered whether that's true. How'd you fare during 2008? It'd be nice to collect some datapoints from someone else.
The phenomenon seemed most true just after The Bubble. I think tptacek mentioned he had some pretty substantial credentials yet finding a job was extraordinarily difficult.
I've only been asked 3-4 times about my college education (or lack thereof), and its never stopped me from getting a job. YMMV.
Those still get harder in a downturn, but you need less company agreement that your skills are good. Instead, sell directly to people who mostly don't care about your formal credentials.
It's not perfect. But even a little goes a long way.
You don't need AWS? Cool, I can manage Hyper-V, Openstack, or VMware. You use .NET instead of Python? I can do that. You need me to be customer facing? Easy as pie.
I am not an IT professional. I've a business professional that uses IT to solve problems.
EDIT: /u/todayiamme, saw your reply you wanted to get in touch. I'd love to!
Now I don't want to interview 200, because all I need to find is one of the 20. So first thing to do is filter the pile based on some objective measure. Having a degree is a quick way to get from 200 to 100 or less. And my experience has shown, that at least for some jobs, the bulk of the 20 will be in the 100 that are left.
Of course I'm talking about technical jobs here - if I was looking for a carpenter I'd use a different filter.
Are there people who would be perfect for the job excluded in the filtering process? Of course the are. But I'm going to reject 19 perfectly good candidates anyway so filtering a few out early is fine.
Of course the filter is not the only filter, and is not absolute. Experience trumps education so good specific experience can get you through to. And (for me) personal passion for the work trumps them all. That's hard to put in a resume, but is great whe I find it.
Incidentally of the 200 resumes the goal is to interview as few as possible. Ideally < 10. Like I say, I don't need 20 great people, just 1.
In order to improve the odds though one can apply some reasonable filter. Any filter that does a better job of improving the dart board odds is, by definition, better than a dart board.
Now different jobs benefit from different filters. If I'm applying to do a job that takes a high-functioning brain, then it makes sense to apply a filter that already clasifying people based on mental ability.
It's important to understand that the goal is not to find the best 20 people. The goal is not to even find the best person. (because after some level the notion of "best" is highly subjective.) the goal of a recruiter is to find someone who is capable, and is good at the job.
The goal of you, the person trying to get hired, is to get past the filters. You may think you're the "best" person for the job ( but how would you know without yourself interviewing the other 199?)
Some filters, like a college degree, are hard to overcome. Because I can completely ignore you and still succeed in my task of hiring someone. To be honest what -you- think of my filter(s) is irrelevant. I'm not out to find every quality candidate - just fining 1 is sufficient.
If you find you are being negatively affected by hiring filters then you need to be creative about overcoming that.
That seems like a waste of time for both sides.
I have seen those without credentials having a harder time finding work, but I don't see why they would be the first to be ousted. Credentials are great for making the first cut in applying for a job, because they have to make that decision with relatively little time and effort. Credentials are also great for applying to companies that have little trust in their ability to interview candidates, but after you have been there for a while, they know what you can do. It doesn't make sense to get rid of people based on lack of credentials (and I've never seen it happen).
So if you've been lucky enough to have someone believe in you without caring about your missing degree, and you do that for enough years, you should be just fine.
I'd say luck comes into play in any job. You could have an ivy league background. Now someone thinks you're overqualified for the position, and picks the cheaper candidate.
In my case, it was part luck and part a numbers game. I was 17, and applied at ~30 companies for their IT roles. Why not? It was cheap for me (print resume, mail, follow up over phone) both in resources and time. I took pics with of my racks of older cheap PCs in my parent's basement doing distributed.net's RC5 challenge, all networked and cable tied, proxy configs, etc. It wasn't a hard sell to a decision maker.
Out of curiosity, how much technical knowledge was needed for the CNC mill?
Most definitely. I'm not a sit on the couch and watch TV sort of guy. I need to be doing something, and I love that my wife loves to join me in my endeavors.
> Out of curiosity, how much technical knowledge was needed for the CNC mill?
6-8 hours of research.
My son had an idea, so I learned injection molding (smallworks.com).
Companies I've helped start have both cratered (Vivato) and had successful exits (Wayport).
I'm 52.
Engineering is not reading a few books and appearing for exams.
I wonder when he'll start working on his first space capsule/micro ship next :)
So I would wager this was a much lower cost than Felix, who had a lot of custom work done for the sake of marketing.
http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2014/01/06/everest-2014-the-...
But mostly, if you're strapped to tanks of pure oxygen, wouldn't you want to avoid proximity to any sort of combustion?
Please note that I am confident his choice here was the correct one, I just want to understand why.
I'm not familiar with the design considerations here, but lots of people remark that they seem like "the wrong solution". But, they are reliable, simple, and light weight.
A drogue is about 3 to N get feet wide. It is used for z axis stability, to slow you down a bit so that when the parachute deploys it will not explode, and finally to actually deploy the parachute.
If you do not use a drogue chute then you would use a pilot chute to deploy the parachute. The difference between a pilot and drogue chute is minimal. In fact, design wise the only difference is that after you deploy the drogue you need to pull a handle to open the container holding the parachute, at which point the drogue chute becomes a pilot chute. A deployed pilot chute will open the container without needing to pull a separate handle. Drogues are also generally much hardier than pilot chutes as they have more force acting on them.
A drogue is not a parachute. The para in parachute means it is designed to be used to slow you down enough to survive your fall. A drogue is not designed to do so.
Tandem skydiving, the kind everyone does recreationally, uses drogue parachutes to maintain what would be terminal velocity for one person. Terminal velocity for two people lying on top of each other (or one 500lb person) would be too high to safely deploy either the main or reserve parachute.
So yes, a tandem skydive is still a skydive even though you use a drogue. Eustace, even though he used a drogue, has the record for highest skydive. Arguably Baumgartner had the record for longest freefall without a drogue. But longest freefall without a drogue is a silly record to cling to. Does anyone care who has the record for driving the fastest land vehicle without a helmet?
This still is amazing. And from the perspective of a professional skydiver, Eustace broke Baumgartner's record fair and square.
On a side note: If the marketing/publicity budget on this was so much lower, and the design was simpler, how much less do you think this cost compared to FB/Redbull Stratos?
> Mr. Eustace said Google had been willing to help with the project but he declined company support, worried that his jump would become a marketing event.
Seems like he did it just because he wanted to do it... And that's awesome.
And are you sure the drogue was used during the entirety of Alan's jump? It mentioned that he did a series of backflips and broke the sound barrier during his jump. Is that even possible w/ a drogue?
EDIT: Plus, you seem to harbor some negativity about his achievements. Two things (1) It was verified by the US Parachute Assn, and (2) perhaps this reaction is precisely why Alan didn't seek press fanfare; it's an awesome accomplishment by itself!
Also, off-topic, but this is some terrible ad placement: http://imgur.com/T6MBg2x
When I saw the title, I was like, wow, someone has the same name as Alan.
Since then I think a lot of infrastructure components have been pulled out of the individual product teams they were supporting and centralized under Urs, the company as a whole has been reorganized along product area lines with each PA getting its own SVP, and many product areas that were brand new then are huge 1000-person orgs. But Google's org chart now certainly doesn't reflect what it was when any given ex-Googler left (not even when I did, a scant 5 months ago; I hear there were at least 2 big re-orgs in the last week).
There was a lot that annoyed me about the RedBull promo jump, a whole lot, but the most annoying thing is how they misrepresented his view using fisheye lenses to make it look as though the horizon curved radically for him. They wanted viewers to think he was in outer space, in that regard.
If you watch the RedBull footage, you can see when this phony effect gets turned upside down when he was upside down; in that case the earth curved radically the other way.
I'd love to see video of it and see if he had better control than Felix. We almost lost him and I wonder if Alan had implemented controls to prevent a bad spin.
On another note, I love that he used the suit only instead of a diving bell - completely simplifying the whole process. It's arguably more dangerous, but not by much.
The article mentions a small early parachute that is used to prevent that spin. You can also see it on the video.
I was under the impression that the "faster than the speed of sound" thing was technically deceptive, since it used the speed of sound at sea-level but they were only doing that many miles up where the speed of sound was much higher. Terminal velocity should always be lower than the speed of sound, is my thinking here. If that is the case, then I wouldn't expect a sonic boom.
Is it actually the case that they have enough momentum to continue to fall that fast as they enter the denser atmosphere?
This is explored (with graphs!) here for the case of Mr. Baumgartner's jump:
http://blog.wolfram.com/2012/10/24/falling-faster-than-the-s...
I've long thought that if I ever acquire the means I'd want to take a U2 ride like James May [1]. I'm thinking I'd definitely prefer this.
Also, no wonder his name felt so familiar [2].
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJoMDq4AyLc
2: http://pando.com/2014/03/27/how-steve-jobs-forced-google-to-...
I want to experience this before I die.
This gets a lot cheaper when you remove the survival constraint.
I have no idea how much this one jump used nor what that looks like in comparison to world stocks.
Any hydrogen leak would rapidly rise away so it's actually quite safe. Certainly much safer than gasoline and we use that every day - including sparks.
The fire and fuel is much lighter than air and would quickly rise away from you, so there is no hazard there.
See the UFL for the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammability_limit
I think the amount used for balloons is a tiny fraction of that used for welding and industrial processes.
The only good reason I can think of, discounting the fire hazard, is the poor reputation of high pressure hydrogen tanks for the reverse Joule-Thomson effect (i.e., unlike most gasses, hydrogen heats up when expanded out of a nozzle), but according to [1] it is not enough to cause ignition.
[1] Health and Safety Executive. 'Spontaneous Ignition of Hydrogen'. Research Report RR615, 2008. URL: www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr615.pdf
Other random Google SVPs do:
doesn't FAA prohibit supersonic flights over US territory? :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_miss...
New Mexico has designated corridors for supersonic flight.
FAA has been known to grant waivers for record attempts like this and it sounds like he was too high for the sonic boom to cause major concerns.
If you want to go higher, you're going to need to use a rocket instead of a gas-filled balloon.
And the balloon has to have a smaller density than the surrounding air to be floating.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6714639/ns/technology_and_science-...
Henry Spencer reckons it's been seriously considered all the way back, and he invented regular expressions, so, er, well apparently being a computer scientist gives you parachute credibility this week:
http://yarchive.net/space/launchers/personal_reentry.html
And there's some intriguing work from various people about using tethers as highly unconventional parachutes:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00945765950...
Astronaut daredevils: both cool and nerdy.
Apollo 11's crew had all of NASA backing it; that doesn't make them less heroic.
A better analogy would be: No more heroic than risking his life to design and build a better sports car than has ever been built.
http://www.space.com/27537-supersonic-near-space-dive-photos...
Of the three criterion listed, I'd say he met each of them.
Sensationalism, while perhaps strictly unnecessary, is inspiring, and that is very good for science. Anyway this jump was positively muted, especially compared to the publicity that Felix Baumgartner's jump got. Some attention is necessary; how else are we supposed to know about great feats people have accomplished, scientific or otherwise? Aside from news articles about the jump itself, there is a very informative website about the goals of the company behind this jump [3]
[1] http://www.ejectionsite.com/stapp.htm
They argued first that risk taking is necessary, and then on top of that, gave an argument that sensationalism can have some positive consequences.
I think this (breaking the response into responses to the two parts) is probably quite distinct from a straw man, and except for potential problems from not specifically covering the interactions between the two parts, seems probably valid?
Unless they edited the post since you responded, which I can't tell if that is the case or not.
tl;dr: I don't think they were acting as if you said that?
Source: https://www.inkling.com/read/guyton-hall-textbook-of-medical...
Just out of curiosity, isn't this expected? It is my extremely layman understanding that the boom happens behind the object moving supersonically, and obviously if you're going faster than the speed of sound it won't catch up to you, right?
At the altitude Mr Eustace jumped he probably didn't feel any buffeting either.
it's worth reading the whole thing, including the references.
But really? Wow. That definitely came out of left field considering how long Felix' jump was promoted until the jump day.
With a free fall you are at standstill relative to the ground before you start.
Details and rationale at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=607491
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_%28spacecraft%29#Launc...
The use of atmospheric braking is a common, but not required, part of atmospheric re-entry.
It is theoretically possible, if highly inefficient, to lose orbital velocity by using propulsion and re-enter from orbit without using atmospheric braking.
To answer the original question, re-entry occurs when the atmosphere is first left and then re-entered. The definition of where this boundaries lies is ambiguous, but most definitions put it in the 80-120km range.
So Alan reached 1/2 to 1/3 of the elevation that would have been required for this to qualify as re-entry.
Also, birds could be 'long flight' dozing while flying in formation and are NOT looking up.
Congrats. and am I off on my questioning, since this is question 122 or is the fluoride and pollutants in drinking water decreasing general intelligence in USA like the lead did in the Roman Empire?
I know this as I'm a pilot and I've had quite a few very close encounters with birds when taking off or landing. The plane I fly only manages 100mph, so generally the birds have time to get out of the way.
"Oh, but this one fell from slightly higher up than the other one!"
Can somebody explain why this is impressive or cool? Anyone can fall.
And as for falling being easy: when's the last time you jumped off a high dive board? Try it sometime.
I can stand in ovation at the engineering work in all this, but I don't see reason to applaud the rider.
Stick your hand out a car window and not the force at say 70 mph. Now imagine it twice as fast. If your hand is not symmetrical you spin. I can do turns in the air with just my hands. A misplaced arm or leg is going to cause even more force and faster rate of turn.
1. Making the ascent.
2. Surviving the environmental conditions of the ascent.
3. Converting the ascent to a fall.
4. Surviving the environmental conditions of the fall.
5. Surviving subsequent contact with the ground.
6. Getting home from wherever you landed.
7. (optional) Taking good pictures and video.
Three of those seven elements are always potentially lethal, and three more could be, if not planned correctly. It's not quite the same league as jumping off a roof into a swimming pool.
Sitting in a globe and wait to get up there
> 2. Surviving the environmental conditions of the ascent.
That's what the suit is for, no ability needed from the rider
> 3. Converting the ascent to a fall.
Pressing a button
> 4. Surviving the environmental conditions of the fall.
Again, the suit
> 5. Surviving subsequent contact with the ground.
This time the parachute
> 6. Getting home from wherever you landed.
The team working with the guy
> 7. (optional) Taking good pictures and video.
Ok, so his prowess is in being able to not faint in the process and being able to hold a camera.
Compare to say, free diving, were the person needs the ability to hold his breath for a period of time, or mountain climbing where they need the physical strength to walk up a mountain several kilometers with 20kg on the back.
The way you are talking, you probably think it's trivial to jump out of an airplane with a parachute. There is a lot more to skydiving than just jumping and deploying a parachute. There is a reason you need to do a lot of jumps before you can jump at high altitude, and this record-breaking jump is even harder than that.
There is a reason people who are knowledgable about skydiving are impressed by this jump (see the comments higher up on the page), and that's because they appreciate the challenges. You are unimpressed because you know very little about these challenges. This is okay if you keep your ignorance to yourself, but embarrassing otherwise.
All you need to solve the technical problem is the solution to that problem. Easy.