DescentBB

a bit under 1 day 3 hrs from now...
http://www.redbullstratos.com/the-missi ... watch-live!/

Gonna beat that last famous jump, Joe Kittinger from 102,800 feet in 1960 we've all seen the cool video of.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/10/supers ... esday.html

Felix Baumgartner plans to ascend to 120,000 feet in a 55-story-tall helium-filled balloon and then jump back to earth. During the first few minutes of his descent, his free fall is expected to break the speed of sound—about 690 miles per hour in those atmospheric conditions. As air density increases, the speed of his descent will gradually decrease. The 43-year-old will then deploy his parachute, returning to earth hopefully within a few miles of the balloon's liftoff location.


The previous record for skydiving is held by Joe Kittinger, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, who dived from 102,800 feet in 1960. To prepare for the jump, Mr. Baumgartner jumped from 97,146 feet in June, eclipsing the second-highest skydive mark held by Yevgeny Andreyev, a member of the former Soviet Union's Air Force.

The suit looks so floppy, with a lot of wires sticking out from it, i hope they don't get ripped off by the inevitable wind.
This kinda sky drop thing could be a cool way to test those sleek MIT mars suits, you know the ones with the "lines of non-extension". They'd keep you warm right? :-/ oh well, i doubt those things are anywhere near ready for service.
JOHN MADDEN!JOHN MADDEN!JOHN MADDEN!

(edit: damnit now i've been googling about lines of non-extension for 5 hours)

But can he beat the music video?

:jumps:
"Oh crap I forgot my parachute!"

Cool. If I'm not mistaken that first guy almost died, I'll have to re-look.

Kittinger's first high-altitude jump, from about 76,400 feet (23,300 m) on November 16, 1959, was a near-disaster when an equipment malfunction caused him to lose consciousness.[2] The automatic parachute opener in his equipment saved his life. He went into a flat spin at a rotational velocity of about 120 rpm. The g-forces at his extremities have been calculated to be over 22 times the force of gravity, setting another record.[

Lol, that guys lucky he didn't fling apart.

guysguys, i've got this cool idea for steel* banded armour that follows the lines of non-extension. Each line of non-extension will be thickened into a band, they will all overlap like scales, and the suit will thus move and shift around on itself quite a lot and be rather dynamic. In my mind it looks like a cool and unique form of plate armour, but IRL it'll probably just end up looking like an artificial muscle exo-skeletal suit (Since lines of non-extension tend to follow musclegroups.).

*edit: haha STEEL? that'll be heavy as ★■◆● what on earth am i thinking.

Alter-Fox wrote::jumps:
"Oh crap I forgot my parachute!"

It's ok tho, Fizzy Lifting Drinks Red Bull gives you wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiYOUGETNOTHINGYOULOSEGOODDAYSIR

Or you just turn yourself into a very small dragon. Probably more practical... and infinite coolness! Or is that hotness? Plus you won't even need a parachute... but you'll probably be disqualified from record-setting on the grounds of not being human. Welcome to my life...

Reminds me of one of these Roid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nine- ... adillo.jpg

flip

maybe like the bands of this but instead of just horizontal bands, very complex bands following the lines of this.
Could look like a more complicated version of this, probably ending up like this.
If it looks like this, i might have missed a stitch or something.

Alter-Fox wrote:Welcome to my life...

YES GOOD


edit: wooo, nice

28 minutes people!

bleh, delays delays.
apparently the earliest launch will be 4 hours from now, but that'll get delayed again too i bet.



BED 4 ME

yep. Sure enough they delayed it again, more gusty winds high up apparently.

Today, the launch of the Red Bull Stratos capsule had to be stopped at 11:42 a.m. local time in Roswell, New Mexico just before Felix Baumgartner's giant 30 million cubic foot balloon had been fully inflated and made ready for take off. From early morning the team postponed the launch due to strong winds at 700 feet - the balloon's top - waiting for the right weather window to open. The launch was scheduled for 11:40 a.m., the balloon inflation had begun, and then gusty winds picked up and made a launch impossible.

They havn't even given word yet on the next possible launch window, psssh. Should have SpaceX running this stuff, their PR and social media interactions run as smoooooth as a silkworm's arse.
Delays are all good and well, but they gotta have enough media contingencies worked out to keep their adoring public informed no matter what. Can't just leave us hangin', some ppl are rumouring that the guy died lol (good one).
Meh who knows, maybe that's part of the media plan to keep things viral: poorly manage the announcements so that rumours run wild, that'll keep people talking (and publicity high) all on it's own.

Red Bull gives you wingsNOTHINGGOODDAYSIR


Delays give Felix sadface

Guess this is the feed to watch in the meantime: https://twitter.com/RedBullStratos
7h ago - "Weather Update: Tomorrow conditions are not suitable for a launch. Weather updates coming soon"

Apparently they can't even re-use the balloon once it's been inflated, so they have to switch to a backup. That can't be cheap.

weeee

nice


soo i hear that he passed the 700MPH mark?

I was wondering if he'd burn up on entry...whee, human comet.

I have this DVR'd (HDNet broadcast). Might watch the jump tonight; I'm betting my son will think it's pretty cool.

Gotta make you a bit nervous to ride a single balloon to 120,000 feet when it makes a ziplock bag look tough by comparison...

woodchip wrote:I was wondering if he'd burn up on entry...whee, human comet.

I wondered about that too. A human being is not very aerodynamic. I'd think he'd heat up quite a bit. That flat spin was a little scary though. Those are tough to stop in airplanes even. Art Scholl died after getting stuck in an upside down flat spin.

The spin must not have been that serious: I'd heard he has a drogue chute that automatically deploys if the Gee sensor peaks out (it had a 3 Gee limit maybe?)

woodchip wrote:I was wondering if he'd burn up on entry...whee, human comet.

SciShow was saying that one of the "why didn't he go higher though?" considerations could have been coz he would have started to burn up in re-entry if he went much higher.
[youtube]62sRY_B7krM[/youtube]

TBH tweaking a suit design for gradually increasing jump heights, and thus speeds, and thus air friction temps, sounds to me like a fun ass job! Small tweaks here and there, streamlining, increasing the thermal capability and aerodynamic robustness of the material. Packing in more and more thermal insulation for the wearer. Every tiny step of the way giving instant psychological rewards. Occasionally inevitable paradigm shifts needed in the design to go further, compromises here and there all adding up. Looking less and less like a suit, maybe encapsulating him in a tiny aerodynamic shell and heatsheild. Eventually reaching traditional re-entry speeds. And then continuing to tweak even further! How fast can we get this guy? The design getting more and more exotic, as we pass the limits of traditional material science, but keep going.

I question if it is possible to go high enough with a balloon that you could get excessive heat buildup from friction with air on the jump back (remember a balloon can't actually leave the atmosphere).

The main component of re-entry heat/friction from traditional space flights isn't from the gravity pulling the object back to earth, it is actually from burning off the orbital velocity that kept you up there in the first place. This guy fell from about 128,000 feet and according to the site reached approximately 1,137 kilometers per hour. While objects in low earth orbit such as the ISS and most satellites (and the vast majority of manned space flights except the Apollo missions) travel at roughly 28,000 kilometers per hour (7.8 km/second) to maintain orbit. So when an object re-enters from low earth orbit, it slams into the atmosphere at almost 25 times faster than this guy managed to reach. There is probably is a limit to how high someone can go before terminal velocity would start to burn them up from friction with the atmosphere, but that altitude is probably high enough that you would require a rocket to reach it.

I'm in pretty good shape. Does that mean I could do what Felix did without any special training or space suit?

Isaac wrote:I'm in pretty good shape. Does that mean I could do what Felix did without any special training or space suit?

Only in your dreams.

That would be a pretty boring dream, as nightmares go.

Even Curiosity isn't impressed:



However, I would like to do the same jump. I don't care how old I get.

Jeff250 wrote:But can he beat the music video?

Yes.

heh, that combo tears me up, brilliant.

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what was the reason for the gondola again? just sitting in a simple suspended lawnchair with oxygen bottles attached would reduce weight significantly. If it's too cold, integrate a small fuel/battery powered heater into the chair or suit. It only has to last for the 2 hours or so to reach the height.

Also, it might have been an idea to have a backup drogue chute mounted on his stomach, incase he's spinning uncontrollably on his back, that was a thing that happened. If the emergency drogue chute on his back deployed during such a time, it may be ineffective, or worse - even end up tangling up.