Sunday Times 2
Free-fall from the edge of space
Should anyone else be planning the feat Felix Baumgartner will undertake on Tuesday morning, this weekend would be a time of sleepless nights and dread-filled days. For 23 miles up on the edge of space, and wearing only a pressurised suit and a parachute, he will pause at the hatch of his tiny capsule as it ascends into the heavens beneath one of the biggest balloons ever made.
Red Bull Stratos announced Friday that the jump by extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner have been moved from Monday to Tuesday thanks to a cold front with gusty winds. The jump can only be made if winds on the ground are under 2 mph for the initial launch of a balloon carrying Baumgartner.
No more than 20 minutes later, the world will know whether this audacious Austrian has become the first skydiver to break the sound barrier in the highest, fastest freefall descent in history. If anything goes wrong – and despite five years of planning and training, there is plenty that could – it might get very, very messy.
The nightmare scenario that Felix’s project director likens to a ‘horror film’ would involve his blood boiling, brain bursting and eyeballs popping out – all of it watched live via the internet around the globe.
This may sound like the sort of lunatic feat that no one but a man who has spent 20 years at the more extreme end of extreme sports would want anything to do with. But a team of engineers, doctors and pilots have spent five years working alongside Baumgartner, 43, to ensure he gets down alive and in one piece.
For one of them, Dr Jonathan Clark, the operation’s medical director, there is an intensely personal reason for being involved.
Since his astronaut wife Laurel was killed in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, the former Nasa flight surgeon has devoted his career to working to improve astronauts’ chances of surviving a similar high-altitude disaster.
‘I have every expectation he’ll come through this successfully,’ says Dr Clark. ‘But, you know, it is still an unknown.’
As for Baumgartner, quite the Hollywood action man with his rugged good looks and Born To Fly tattooed on his arm, he and his backers are sufficiently confident that they are filming the descent and streaming it on YouTube.
Banishing talk of nerves, he says he would never jump if the odds were against him. And he insists he hasn’t got a death wish.
Of the sceptics who will be holding their hands in front of their eyes as he hurtles towards Earth at nearly 700mph, he says simply: ‘I think they underestimate the skills of a skydiver.’
Fearless Felix has been flinging himself out of planes and off skyscrapers for years. He has clocked up 2,500 skydiving jumps, including one in which he became the first person to ‘fly’ across the English Channel, with carbon-fibre wings strapped to his back. He has performed various horrifying ‘base jumps’, freefalling off the Christ statue in Rio and leaping head-first into a pitch black, 620ft-deep cave in Croatia.
Baumgartner says his supersonic plunge will be the end of his ‘journey’ as a daredevil. He intends to retire with his girlfriend and settle down to a quiet life – which in his case means becoming a rescue helicopter pilot.
Ahead of his grand finale, he has completed a couple of high-altitude dress rehearsals. In July, he leapt from 96,640ft – just 6,000ft shy of a world record set in 1960 by Joe Kittinger, a U.S. air force test pilot.
Space debris threatens ISS
MOSCOW (AFP) – The International Space Station is in danger of being hit by two pieces of debris from an old Russian satellite that had previously hit a US craft in 2009, a news report said on Wednesday.
The space station will encounter pieces of the Kosmos 2251 military spy orbiter in the next few days, the Interfax news agency quoted a source at Russian Mission Control as saying.
“Two fragments of the Kosmos 2251 craft may pose a danger to the station,” the unnamed source was quoted as saying.
The source added that the station may now have to manoeuvre out of the path of the approaching debris in a special operation tentatively planned for Thursday.
The satellite crashed into a US Iridium-33 satellite in February 2009 in the first such space accident of its kind. The collision created hundreds of smaller fragments that pose a danger to both the station and other satellites.
© Daily Mail, London
Follow @timesonlinelk
Related Posts:
Space debris threatens ISSMOSCOW (AFP) - The International Space Station is in danger of being hit by two pieces of debris from an ...
Three Chinese space heroes return to EarthBEIJING, June 30 (AFP) - Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth as heroes on Friday after carrying out China's most ...
The real space raceNasa astronaut Sunita Williams completed the first triathlon in space, running, biking and 'swimming' as, 250 miles below, athletes did ...
SL space academy ready to blast off with Chinese expertiseChina will lend its expertise to Sri Lanka’s first space academy to be launched next year, through a joint venture ...
Sri Lankan space academy with Chinese supportChina will lend its expertise to Sri Lanka’s first space academy to be launched next year, through a joint venture ...