With no reference points, "you don't know how fast you travel," he said.Ĭoincidentally, Baumgartner's accomplishment came on the 65th anniversary of the day that U.S. I was fighting all the way down because I knew that there must be a moment where I can handle it."īaumgartner said traveling faster than sound is "hard to describe because you don't feel it." The pressurized suit prevented him from feeling the rushing air or even the loud noise he made when breaking the sound barrier. He added: "In that situation, when you spin around, it's like hell and you don't know if you can get out of that spin or not. I put seven years of my life into this," he said. "When I was spinning first 10, 20 seconds, I never thought I was going to lose my life but I was disappointed because I'm going to lose my record. "Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are," an exuberant Baumgartner told reporters outside mission control after the jump.Ībout half of Baumgartner's nine-minute descent was a free fall of 119,846 feet, according to Brian Utley, a jump observer from the FAI, an international group that works to determine and maintain the integrity of aviation records.ĭuring the first part of Baumgartner's free fall, anxious onlookers at the command center held their breath as he appeared to spin uncontrollably. Among them was his mother, Eva Baumgartner, who was overcome with emotion, crying. Landing on his feet in the desert, the man known as "Fearless Felix" lifted his arms in victory to the cheers of jubilant friends and spectators who closely followed at a command center. The capsule he jumped from had reached an altitude of 128,100 feet above Earth, carried by a 55-story ultra-thin helium balloon. As the jump unfolded, the space shuttle Endeavor crept toward a Los Angeles museum, where it will become nothing more than an exhibit.īaumgartner, a 43-year-old Austrian, hit Mach 1.24, or 833.9 mph, according to preliminary data, and became the first person to reach supersonic speed without traveling in a jet or a spacecraft. It was a last hurrah for what some have billed as a dying Space Age, as NASA's shuttle program ends and the ways humans explore space is dramatically changing. More than 130 digital outlets carried the live feed, organizers said. Instead, millions flocked online, drawing more than 8 million simultaneous views to a YouTube live stream at its peak, YouTube officials said. The event happened without a network broadcast in the United States, though organizers said more than 40 television stations in 50 countries - including cable's Discovery Channel in the U.S. It proved, once again, the power of the Internet in a world where news travels as fast as Twitter. It was part scientific wonder, part daredevil reality show, with the live-streamed event instantly capturing the world's attention on a sleepy Sunday at the same time seven NFL football games were being played. The tightly-orchestrated jump meant primarily to entertain became much more than that in the dizzying, breathtaking moment - a collectively shared cross between Neil Armstrong's moon landing and Evel Knievel's famed motorcycle jumps on ABC's "Wide World of Sports." Capturing the World's Attention "The only thing you want is to come back alive." "When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about breaking records anymore, you do not think about gaining scientific data," Baumgartner said after the jump. Millions watched him breathlessly as he shattered the sound barrier and then landed safely about nine minutes later, becoming the world's first supersonic skydiver. (MORE: Skydiver Heeds Advice from Previous Record-Holder )Ī second later, he stepped off the capsule and barreled toward the New Mexico desert as a tiny white speck against a darkly-tinted sky. Twenty four miles below him, millions of people were right there with him, watching on the Internet and marveling at the wonder of the moment. Felix Baumgartner stood alone at the edge of space, poised in the open doorway of a capsule suspended above Earth and wondering if he would make it back alive.
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