Eventually, however, he was able to use his great experience, from more than 2, career dives, to correct his fall and get into a stable configuration. Even before this drama, it was thought the mission might have to be called off. As he went through last-minute checks inside the capsule, it was found that a heater for his visor was not working. This meant the visor fogged up as he exhaled. The team took a calculated risk to proceed after understanding why the problem existed.
Baumgartner's efforts have finally toppled records that have stood for more than 50 years. Kittinger set his marks for the highest, farthest, and longest freefall when he leapt from a helium envelope in His altitude was ,ft 31km. His record for the longest freefall remains intact - he fell for more than four and a half minutes before deploying his chute; Baumgartner was in freefall for four minutes and 20 seconds.
Kittinger, now an octogenarian, has been an integral part of Baumgartner's team, and has provided the Austrian with advice and encouragement whenever the younger man has doubted his ability to complete such a daring venture.
The year-old adventurer - best known for leaping off skyscrapers - first discussed seriously the possibility of beating Kittinger's records in Since then, he has had to battle technical and budgetary challenges to make it happen. What he was proposing was extremely dangerous, even for a man used to those skyscraper stunts. Others who have tried to break the records have lost their lives in the process. Baumgartner's team built him a special pressurised capsule to protect him on the way up, and for his descent he wore a next generation, full pressure suit made by the same company that prepares the flight suits of astronauts.
Jim Clash: Why did Felix Baumgartner postpone his jump for so long? Red Bull had been particularly silent during those five long years of prep. Some people get claustrophobia in a pressure suit. I was there with Felix when he went into one for his first time, in Wooster, Massachusetts. You can always tell claustrophobia by the eyes. I watched very carefully, and Felix did not show any signs of it. For the next three or four years, he did the altitude chamber tests and everything else in a pressure suit.
Finally, we had to test in San Antonio, Texas, which required him to be in the suit for four hours. The day before we were supposed to leave, he decided he could not do it, that he had claustrophobia. He felt he could put up with the suit for about an hour, but then had to get out. He quit the project then, and went home. It took five months with a bunch of psychiatrists and sports psychologists to finally convince him that he could do the jump. As Baumgartner ascends, his balloon and capsule will pass through an atmospheric layer called the tropopause.
Baumgartner's balloon will be stressed by the cold, constructed as it is from plastic film just 0. Outside the capsule, Baumgartner, insulated by his suit, will descend through the tropopause in a matter of seconds, minimizing the dangers of such extreme temperatures. Wind gusts are a worry. Exposed to extreme low temperatures, a balloon can become almost brittle according to Kittinger's account for National Geographic magazine in That kind of stress could result in a rupture.
His team will employ a fleet of their own balloons to track weather conditions and wind patterns at every layer of the atmosphere. Ground winds of over two miles three kilometers an hour could scratch the mission, and winds at higher altitudes could cause the balloon to drift off course and Baumgartner to be lost.
The highest risk during descent is a flat spin, where Baumgartner would lose control of his free fall and begin to spin laterally, his head and feet rotating around his center. A flat spin draws blood into the jumper's head and feet. At a speed exceeding miles kilometers an hour, a flat spin could spin a jumper at to rotations a minute, creating a situation of extreme negative G's—the gravitational force that, in much milder form, creates that feeling of weightlessness as a roller coaster crests a hill.
Depending on the speed, a flat spin would could cause anything from headache, shortness of breath, and vision failure to mental confusion, unconsciousness, and burst eyeballs—when pressures exceeding -4 G's build up in the skull, blood and spinal fluid are forced outward, and their main escape routes are through the ocular cavities. The flat-spin risk can be mediated with a technology first developed for Kittinger: a stabilization parachute to prevent further increase in rotation, deployed on command, or automatically if In Kittinger's stabilization parachute was designed to deploy automatically shortly after he jumped, to prevent a flat spin.
But Baumgartner has his eyes on a new speed record. He will be able to deploy the parachute himself, but it won't open automatically unless he's already in a flat spin and Instead he will assume a rigid aerodynamic body position for the entire free fall—head first, arms at sides—and hope for the best.
The dive team calculates that, in optimal conditions, Baumgartner will accelerate from 0 to miles an hour in the first 40 seconds of his descent. At this speed, he will catch up to, then pass, the speed of sound. What are the risks of that? Red Bull Stratos Medical Director Jon Clark said, "We try to anticipate as much as we can about supersonic speed, but we really don't know, because nobody has done this before. Born to fly Felix was born in , but his journey truly began at the age of 16, when he completed his first ever skydive.
He later left the army and for a short while supported himself by repairing motorbikes. The helium-filled balloon took Felix on his two-hour journey into the stratosphere. Highest altitude untethered outside a vehicle After depressurising the capsule — the point of no return — Felix perched on its ledge for a few final moments before making his death-defying, multiple record-breaking leap to Earth. First human to break the sound barrier in freefall Once he had landed back on solid ground, Felix said: "First we got off with a beautiful launch and then we had a bit of drama with a power supply issue to my visor.
The exit was perfect but then I started spinning slowly. I thought I'd just spin a few times and that would be that, but then I started to speed up. It was really brutal at times. I thought for a few seconds that I'd lose consciousness.
0コメント