Twenty-four miles. That’s about how far it is from Jacksonville to New Berlin, which takes 30 minutes or so by car. Now try to imagine travelling that distance in less than eight minutes. Vertically.
That’s what Austrian Felix Baumgartner did when he jumped out of a balloon-lifted capsule from 128,000 feet. “Sometimes you have to be really high to see how small you really are. I’m going home now,” he said before stepping from the capsule and entering a free-fall from the edge of space.
Baumgartner aimed to set four new records: the highest jump from a platform, the highest manned balloon flight, the fastest free fall, and the longest free fall.
He succeeded in breaking the first three. At 128,000 feet, his free fall was nearly 50,000 feet higher than the previous record, set by Soviet Air Force colonel Yevgeni Nikolayevich Andreyev in 1962. Baumgartner broke US Air Force colonel Joseph Kittinger’s balloon ascent record by some 28,000 feet. Kittinger also held the record for fastest free fall at 614 miles per hour, until Baumgartner beat it with 834 miles per hour. This was the first time a human has broken the sound barrier outside of a vehicle.
Baumgartner failed to set a new record for total free-fall time, which is still held by Kittinger at 4 minutes and 36 seconds.
Baumgartner could only achieve such incredible speeds because he was nearly out of Earth’s atmosphere. Since the air is much thinner up there, there is less resistance, and objects (such as Baumgartner) can reach faster speeds.
In a truly Hollywood-esque twist, Kittinger served as Baumgartner’s capsule communicator and adviser during the record-breaking ascent and jump.
The two hour ascent and following jump was live-streamed on YouTube on October 14.