Posted on 10/14/2012 7:48:40 AM PDT by Vince Ferrer
There will be a second attempt today for Felix to jump from a ballon at 120,000 feet and parachute, breaking the record for high altitude jumps. There should be a live feed on the website.
God speed!
They are starting to inflate the ballon, everything is a GO at this time.
Great! Beat me to it. It looks as if they are GO on inflating the balloon, and that the breezes aloft are now south of a couple of knots, which is what they were waiting for. This is a 22 mile ascent!
Should be set to go in around 30 minutes to 1 hour.
Meanwhile on the Discovery Channel they are showing Mythbusters while waiting to clear the weather hold, periodically they give a status update but the event should be broadcasted on that channel from what they say.
Post-jump interview: Felix, what were you thinking when you went through the sound barrier?
Felix: MOOOOMMMMYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!
(Sorry...just a little humor.)
I hope they planned for heat shielding his helmet. I would have thought it would be more pointed.
I don’t think he’s going to be going fast enough to generate that much heat. However, I’m pretty sure that’s something they thought of.
Here’s hoping those big brass balls don’t cause any problems on the way down.
The standing high altitude jump record was set in 1962 from 100,000 ft, IIRC. Of course, that was part of the early NASA manned space program.
Got a really dumb question: have there already been experiments in dropping objects from near space & measuring reentry velocity? Well, of course there were - they had to determine air friction surface temperatures to calculate how much heat shielding was needed for the space capsules.
In other words, does our high altitude jumper already know for a fact that a supersonic reentry fall prior to contact with lower atmosphere is indeed possible?
Anyway, good luck & Godspeed to him and his venture.
(Here’s hoping those big brass balls don’t cause any problems on the way down.)
ROTFL! Good one! I hope they’re heat shielded too! I wonder how aerodynamic they are - based on their size they definitely should be protruding from the body!
COUNTDOWN!
Broadcast about to start...Here we go!
Thanks for the heads up on the Discovery Channel. I don’t even like jumping off the high dive.
Got it running on my tv, set up as my “second monitor” with the HDMI cable wire from my computer. Highly recommend spending the $12-18 bucks if you’ve got a HDMI-compatible tv, ‘cause you can watch whatever’s broadcast on the net on there and leave your computer free to work.
Just lifted off!
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