Is there a thread for Felix Baumgartner's free fall?

if not, here is a link to the stream:

http://www.redbullstratos.com/live

this dude cray

Nothing's moving on that livestream except for a wispy white cloud.

Showing the launch site now.

Yeah. That cloud's hardly moved in nearly 10 minutes, so wind speed must be really low, which is probably what they want.

4:00 min apparently

man, the last time i watched a balloon live on the internet it turned out there was nobody in it

aborted :(

:(

kid has watched too much Phineas & Ferb

― les rallizes gay nudes (Curt1s Stephens), Thursday, October 15, 2009 3:34 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xposts

damn

boy today sucks and refuses to get exciting!

Going to try again: http://www.redbullstratos.com/live

Launched! I think the estimated time he will arrive at 23 miles high is around 1:30 PM EDT.

Watching now -- the visuals alone are great, what a disorienting view from the camera outside the capsule.

this guy is just gonna float off into space

theres no way they need all those control room dudes

Video gone for me -- I'm getting occasional audio commentary, and the mission data is updating normally.

Kittinger's jump is one of the most amazing human feats ever imo, so I'm loving this.

red bull

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIxH6DToXQ

nice bit of understatement on the commentary about when he did a jump not sure if his parachute was functional: "he later said he was quite anxious about that".

I love how incredibly high tech this is to achieve what is in essence a primitive goal: we're going to lift this guy as high as we can and then drop him to see what happens.

Now that he's up so high, is jumping the only way for him to get down? If something goes wrong, does he just have to float away and die or jump to his death or can he bring the balloon back down somehow.

He's got a pin with him to prick a slow leak maybe

he can bring the balloon down, sry

wonder if they clear up the issue w the face plate heater, tense!

someone post itt if he dies

Scarily, they don't even know for sure when the balloon will stop. They only have estimates.

sitting in that balloon for 2 hrs before the freefall is like when the roller coaster is slowly ascending and you can only anticipate the drop -- except times a billion

commentator was talking about this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit

At or above the Armstrong limit (62,000–63,500 feet), exposed bodily liquids such as saliva, tears, and the liquids wetting the alveoli within the lungs—but not vascular blood (blood within the circulatory system)—will boil away without a pressure suit and no amount of breathable oxygen delivered by any means will sustain life for more than a few minutes.

i love this show

zah ballhoon iz steel rizingk!

He will jump.

egress checklist time

float altitude attained!

that balloon is hella inflated now just like they promised

rising again!

respond felix!

felix confirm depressurize suit replace hose and cover

helmet has gone opaque

got a bit tense then

whole thing is tense!

vent tube from feeding port

"item ten we're gonna skip, because your sun screen is down..."

item 15 drink a red bull

just don't ask him to stir the tanks

Holy shit. This is real heart-in-mouth stuff!

It's really cool that Joe Kittinger is the man on the ground for Baumgartner.

I can hardly believe this is happening

and that I can watch it on a phone

the spinning was the freakiest part, aside from when he first stood up on the platform outside the pod, i almost barfed

anytime they were like "felix come in" and there was a pause...

So did he break the sound barrier or not? They counted it up past 700mph, but I don't know what that means.

press conference begins shortly, so i guess we might find out then?

That was an estimated speed. Perhaps the telemetry was recorded on his suit rather than broadcast and has to be confirmed from multiple data sources (wind speed, gps speed, telescope panning speed, etc) before anythings official.

I guess it doesn't really matter, it's not like I'm going to be disappointed with him

If he reached 700 mph then he broke the Mach 1.

Speed of sound depends on the ambient temperature so I guess they have to check what temperature/height he was at when he was at max speed.

But yeah, looks like he cracked it.

is there a vid

RT @pareene How do we know he didn't turn while he was up there? What if he's a Space Muslim now? Saul you have to listen to me I know it sounds crazy

this probably wont work

http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/full/672177659.gif?key=500276&Expires=1350241827&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIYVGSUJFNRFZBBTA&Signature=KSLH-cRbf7AApmELjpPKPlqnbOKnVjWcItUtqh1sqOyj9bYJZB5REGVSStVrHJl6RW-tl39osjE7Z11-9NmtpWVvdINqHaxb8MkVRmiJxuADAwVO~D5Ta70wBbEMeOYGSpt38VVOhWGoqn8ZEeA35pQVc1FkpNByd2w~SzbPT9o_

it did!

So according to the official site Baumgartner's been doing Red Bull sponsored jumps since 1988. Longevity pays off, I guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v17Na1VO2Wc

Now you'd think they would treat him better

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=393255954080668&id=391339787605618

this'll come in useful
http://i.minus.com/ibnX8aN3JwqrKK.gif

Haha, before this became news today, I figured from the title that Felix Baumgartner was some Australian politician caught in a sex scandal.

833 MPH! Mach 1.24!

!!!

dang

And he's all talking casually here, "Should I push this button and stay alive?"

Kittinger, meanwhile, might have won the press conference:

"I'd like to give the one-fingered salute to everyone who said he was going to break apart when he went supersonic."

today i climbed high, high, far higher than is safe or sane, and i felt like felix on the precipice.

while cleaning my gutters on a flexy ladder, 20ft above the earth. no shit, it was terrifying. 2 ipas with shaky hands afterwards terrifying.

i was not vain enough to hire a chase crew and film it. you'll have to take my word.

a gigantic balloon, that measured 30 million square cubic feet and whose skin was one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag

Kittinger needs to go on the list of people who know how to live.

Mentioned elsewhere, but today is the 65th anniversary of Yeager's first flight to break the sound barrier. Today, Yeager did it again: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-yeager-supersonic-anniversary-20121014,0,1269172.story

So mad this all happened while I was asleep :(

I want to see Baumgartner try out NASA's MOOSE system next. This is the most insane idea ever....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/moose.htm

American manned rescue spacecraft. Study 1963. MOOSE was perhaps the most celebrated bail-out from orbit system of the early 1960's. The suited astronaut would strap the MOOSE to his back, and jump out of the spacecraft or station into free space.
Pulling a ripcord would fill an inflatable heat shield with polyurethane. The astronaut would use a small hand-held gas to orient himself for retro-fire, and then fire a solid rocket motor strapped to his chest to return to earth.

The MOOSE consisted of a chest-mounted parachute, a flexible, folded 1.8 m diameter elastomeric heat shield, and a canister of polyurethane foam. Pulling the deployment cord would fill the shield into shape and encase the back of the astronaut in perfectly form-fitting polyurethane. The astronaut would use a small hand-held gas get device to orient himself for retro-fire, and then fire a solid rocket motor mounted in the device. After aligning himself for re-entry and putting the MOOSE into a slow roll, he would throw the gas gun away. After a ballistic re-entry, the astronaut would pull the ripcord of the chest-parachute, which would pull him away from the heat shield for a parachute landing.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/49/Operation_MOOSE_%28figure_110%29.PNG/800px-Operation_MOOSE_%28figure_110%29.PNG

http://i.imgur.com/E00nl.gif

I could watch that all day until I've died of laughter and dehydration.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/video/2012/oct/15/felix-baumgartner-skydive-lego-video

First footage from his suit camera released:

http://gawker.com/5951752/heres-what-it-looks-like-to-free-fall-from-24-miles-up

I think what really gets me is how trivial, on paper, the distance is. Like I think, "Oh, I can do a 24-mile bike ride in a couple of hours." But 24 miles UP is all LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE territory.

i can drive 24 miles in a car in 20mins

Oh yeah, that fucks with my head all the time. It's about the distance from my house to my mom's house. I've travelled so much farther than that across the surface of the earth. It's such a thin, thin layer.

if it's possible for a atmospheres to be thinner than normal and still be safe, why wouldn't all atmospheres be that thin?

i could fall 24 miles in like six minutes

I was thinking about exactly this xp driving home (30 miles) last night.

Then I got to thinking about Mars. It must have an even thinner atmosphere, right? But iirc Olympus Mons is about thirty miles high! It must poke out into space on its own!

apparently not

The typical atmospheric pressure at the top of Olympus Mons is 72 pascal, about 12% of the average Martian surface pressure of 600 pascal.[14][15] Both are exceedingly low by terrestrial standards. By comparison, the atmospheric pressure at the summit of Mount Everest is 32,000 pascals, or about 32% of Earth's sea level pressure.[16] Even so, high-altitude orographic clouds frequently drift over the Olympus Mons summit, and airborne Martian dust is still present.[17] Although the average Martian surface atmospheric pressure is less than one percent of Earth's, the much lower gravity on Mars increases the atmosphere's scale height; in other words, Mars's atmosphere is expansive and does not drop off in density with height as sharply as Earth's.

You think you've understood something about how the universe works, and then...

...you jump out of a capsule 24 miles up and survive.

What's on yr ipod?

Tom Petty: ..

ah, fagettit...

xxp the difference in scale height isn't that big. yes, the gravity is much lower, but the temperature is lower and the mass of the molecules in the atmosphere is higher than on earth, both of which tend to reduce scale height. the end result is that the three effects nearly cancel out.

h_mars/h_earth = t_mars/t_earth * molecular_mass_of_earth_atmos / molecular_mass_of_mars_atmos * g_earth/g_mars

= -55C/25C * 4.8/7.3 * 10/3.7

= 0.72 * 0.65 * 2.7

= 1.26

i.e. scale height of the martian atmosphere is 25% larger. not enough to explain the clouds above olympus mons imo. that's probably photochemistry and the extreme atmospheric circulation (i.e. weather) around olympus mons, which is nothing like everest.

I am really delighted thatt hings like this are over before I even know what they are.

^^^ I was like "just tell me he didn't die, then I'll watch the video of the drop"

Next time they should drop him from one balloon, and a tricked out Ferrari with a brick on the accelerator from another balloon, to see which gets to the ground first.

Relive the HOLY SHIT ARRRRGH

http://io9.com/this-newly-released-footage-felix-baumgartners-space-j-1513187429

Wait, does this mean we're going to have jump-offs now?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/science/alan-eustace-jumps-from-stratosphere-breaking-felix-baumgartners-world-record.html

And slightly burying the lede, obv -- longtime computer/engineer guy, currently at Google, decides 'fuck it,' works on this three years in secret, turns down Google assistance/publicity to avoid the idea of a marketing event, breaks Baumgartner's record by a hell of a lot.

That's faNtastic, but he needed more awesome video footage.