Preparing for a Record-Breaking 23-Mile-Dive


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The Equipment


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The capsule developed for the Red Bull Stratos Mission is a 6-foot-diameter fiberglass pressure sphere with a half-inch-thick acrylic door and two side windows. "We started building a gondola and ended up building a spacecraft," says Art Thompson, the mission's technical project director. After Baumgartner has landed, the capsule will be separated from the balloon remotely. The balloon and cable will fall back to Earth in a clump, and the capsule's descent will be slowed by a main parachute and stabilized by a drogue. The capsule has a corrugated crunch pad on the base so that it lands with minimal damage.

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Baumgartner will be a wearing a full-pressure suit, similar to that worn by shuttle astronauts, but it's been configured so that he can rotate the hip and arm sockets for greater mobility. He can manually deploy a supersonic drogue parachute to help him avoid spinning wildly, and at about 5000 feet, after 5 minutes and 35 seconds of freefall, he'll deploy his main parachute.

The Risks

When Baumgartner first steps out of the capsule he will be accelerating at 32 feet per second, from subsonic through transonic to supersonic speed; at that point he'll be traveling at Mach 1, or about 700 mph. (The average skydiver falls at a terminal velocity of about 120 mph.) How a human body will react to that experience is one of the mission's great unknowns. "Of course I have fear," Baumgartner acknowledges. "But I can use fear to my own advantage; it helps you focus."

About 35 seconds into his fall, Baumgartner will break the sound barrier and pass through a shock wave—which typically creates a sonic boom. At that point, for a fraction of a second, one part of his body will be going faster than the speed of sound while the rest of his body could be traveling slower. Based on an incident in 1966, in which a test pilot survived the break up of an aircraft traveling at Mach 3, "We know it is possible [to live through it]," Thompson says. But that fall occurred from a lower altitude, 78,000 feet. "In this realm of the flight envelope," he says, "we don't know with certainty he can transit the sound barrier unencumbered."


"The reason [the record] hasn't been broken before is because it's not easy to do," Kittinger says. "A couple people tried; a couple people died. It takes the right equipment, the right team and a little bit of luck."

The Training


By starting low and building on that, Baumgartner will develop the foundation he needs to make split second decisions during the final 120,000-foot jump, Thompson says. "Felix is very calculated," he notes. "People have this misconception of him as a daredevil; he's not. He has the perfect combination of assets for this kind of jump. He reacts fast and calculates quickly."

The Pay-Off



Baumgartner will also be demonstrating whether future pilots and astronauts can emergency egress in high-altitude aircraft and descend safely to Earth. Says Jonathan Clark, the mission's medical director, "As much as it is a test flight, it's also a human endurance challenge."