I watched it live on the Youtube livestream (along with about 8 million other people worldwide)...he went into a flat spin about 15-20 seconds after he jumped. He said in the press conference that he had a drogue chute onboard that he could’ve popped to stabilize his descent and snap him out of the spin but it would have ruined his chance of breaking the sound barrier, so he decided to try and get himself out of it. Somehow, he managed to stabilize himself before the spin got so bad that the G-force of it caused him to “red out” from all the blood getting slung into his head. Even he wasn’t sure what kind of spin/tumble he was in or how he got out of it because he said inside the suit, there was no real feeling for how he was tumbling.
His terminal velocity? 834 miles per hour. Mach 1.24. That’s over 200 mph faster than Kittinger in 1960. And Kittinger got to talk him through the entire thing and watch it happen, and he looked like a proud papa.
}:-)4
Kittinger looked pretty sharp for a guy that’s 84 and spent a year in the Hanoi Hilton.