Alan Eustace, a senior vice president at Google, broke Felix Baumgartner’s record for highest jump yesterday in Roswell NM. Article here. Very little video has been released so far. Unlike Baumgartner’s Red Bull-sponsored jump, this project was carried out in relative secrecy.
Another difference is that Eustace used a stabilizing drogue chute while Baumgartner was in true freefall. Also, Eustace was suspended beneath the balloon in his pressurized suit and didn’t make the ride to jump altitude in a capsule.
Here is a link to the Paragon/Stratex website with more info about the project.
How about the original TelStar? (how many remember the song?)
I’d want to hang a hat on at least some bit of space junk - otherwise, what’s the point?
And I’d want a helmet cam to end all helmet cams!
Born to early for the fun part of space (when everybody gets to go), but at least too late for the truly scary epidemics of which my parents lived in terror - TB, Polio.
Now if we’d just tell the religious fruitcakes to shut the fuck up and get serious about undifferentiated embryonic cells, we just may cure just about anything broken or diseased.
When they did the Red Bull one, the first thing I thought was “dump the gondolla/space capsule and gain a good bit of altitude”. Which is what somebody a smidge smarter in one small way did a few years after the Red Bull jump.
That was easy peasy and thats why it was done shortly after. Why it wasn’t done in the first place is the more interesting question.
I don’t think going higher was as simple as reducing the payload (unless I misunderstood your comment). I did some research and Baumgartner’s balloon was approx. 30,000,000 cubic feet while Eustace’s was approx. 11,000,000 cubic feet. I’m sure Baumgartner could have gone even higher without the capsule, but they were already beating the record Col. Joe Kittinger set in 1960 by a considerable margin. As I recall they ended up somewhat higher than their goal as it was.
So Eustace’s team had a smaller balloon and a lighter payload. I’m sure they calculated how high they could expect to go and what they needed to do to set a new record. But that brought up more questions. What is the upper limit? How high can a helium balloon carry a person? The size of the balloon and the payload are obviously important factors, but so is air density. A balloon won’t keep rising forever, it’ll run out of atmoshere.
According to this article from the New York Times, Eustace said he did not feel or hear the boom as he passed the speed of sound. Baumgartner also broke the sound barrier on his jump; in this article he said “I didn’t feel a sonic boom because I was so busy just trying to stabilize myself.” He had gone into a spin at one point from which he then recovered.
I know fighter jets routinely break the sound barrier without a problem.