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Jumping From Space!

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A man steps off a platform 24 miles above New Mexico and falls faster than sound.

On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner climbed into a pressurized capsule dangling beneath a balloon the size of a 55-story building and rode it to the edge of the atmosphere. The BBC’s Red Bull Space Dive coverage captured what happened next: a jump from 38,969.3 meters that broke the sound barrier without an engine, a wing, or a rocket attached to the man doing the falling. This is the mission behind that footage, and the numbers behind it are still staggering.

• Baumgartner exited the capsule at 38,969.3 meters (roughly 127,851 feet), the highest skydive exit altitude ever recorded at the time.
• He hit a top speed of 1,357.6 km/h (843.6 mph, Mach 1.25), becoming the first human to break the sound barrier in freefall without vehicular power.
• The live YouTube broadcast drew more than 8 million concurrent viewers, a global streaming record.

The Ascent to 39 Kilometers

Baumgartner’s capsule, designated N502FB, was carried skyward by a helium balloon roughly equivalent in height to a 55-story skyscraper. The climb alone took hours, with the Austrian sealed into a full-pressure suit designed to keep him alive in an environment where the ambient air pressure is a small fraction of what exists at sea level. By the time he reached exit altitude, he was higher than most commercial jets fly by a factor of five, standing at the edge of a capsule platform looking down at the curvature of the Earth over Roswell, New Mexico.

Kittinger’s Voice in the Headset

Retired Air Force Colonel Joseph Kittinger, who had held the high-altitude skydive record since his own 1960 jump, worked the mission as Baumgartner’s primary capsule communicator. Kittinger’s voice guided the countdown and the exit, a mentor talking a protégé through the exact moment that would erase his own decades-old record. That handoff — the man who set the mark helping the man who broke it — was as much a part of the broadcast as the jump itself.

Mach 1.25 in a pressure suit, no vehicle, no engine — just a man and the fall.

The Spin, the Speed, the Landing

The jump was not a clean, controlled descent from the first second. Baumgartner hit a violent, uncontrolled spin during the early part of his fall, the kind of tumble that has ended badly for other high-altitude jumpers. He stabilized his body, kept falling, and eventually deployed his parachute after a freefall that lasted roughly four minutes and twenty seconds. He landed on his feet in the New Mexico desert, having reached 1,357.6 km/h along the way — a speed that made him the first person to break the sound barrier using only his own body.

The True Purpose of Data

Beyond the spectacle, medical director Dr. Jonathan Clark said the physiological and telemetry data gathered during the mission would set new standards for emergency high-altitude bailout procedures — information relevant to aerospace and, increasingly, commercial spaceflight. That’s the same instinct that drives coverage of extreme-conditions training elsewhere, from Air Force Special Warfare fitness testing to F-16 cockpit footage from air demonstrations: pushing a human body to its limit on camera, then mining the results for something useful afterward.

Eight million people watched it live, and the number that stuck was Mach 1.25 — a speed reached by a man in a suit, not a plane, falling from higher than anyone had ever jumped before.