Remember Felix Baumgartner? You know, the Austrian daredevil who did that insane sky dive — well, space dive is more like it — from 24 miles up, breaking the sound barrier along the way?
Yeah, that was so 2012.
On Friday, Google executive Alan Eustace managed to one-up Baumgartner’s jump, dropping from a height of more than 25 miles over the Earth, that much closer to the very edge of our atmosphere. According to the Associated Press, Eustace took just over two hours to reach his maximum height of 135,890 feet, where he enjoyed the view for about half an hour.
From there, he had a four-and-a-half-minute freefall, topping out at a speed of 822 mph, before deploying a parachuting at about 18,000 feet. Eustace said he couldn’t tell when he broke the speed of sound, but the sonic boom could be heard by his team on the ground.
Unlike Baumgartner, whose feat was widely publicized amid high-profile sponsorships from the likes of Red Bull, Eustace planned and carried out his mission in relative secrecy. The Senior Vice President of Knowledge at Google Inc. took a sabbatical to work with Paragon Space Development Corp. on the project.
“It was amazing,” Eustace told the New York Times. “It was beautiful. You could see the darkness of space and you could see the layers of atmosphere, which I had never seen before.”
Whereas Baumgartner went up in a capsule attached to a balloon then stepped off a platform, Eustace hung beneath his balloon and untethered himself in order to begin his descent. From the New York Times report:
Mr. Eustace said he gained a love of space and spaceflight while growing up in Orlando, Fla., during the 1960s and 1970s. His family crowded into a station wagon to watch every launch from Cape Canaveral (known as Cape Kennedy during some of that time). A veteran aircraft pilot and parachutist, he worked as a computer hardware designer at Digital Equipment Corporation for 15 years before moving to Google in 2002. …
In order to keep from overheating, Mr. Eustace kept his motions to a minimum during his ascent, including avoiding moving his arm to toggle a radio microphone. Instead, he responded to ground controllers watching him from a camera rigged above his suit by slightly moving one leg to acknowledge their communications.
The company, through its Stratospheric Explorer division, is seeking to develop what it calls “a self-contained spacesuit and recovery system that would allow manned exploration of the stratosphere above 100,000 feet.” There would be both scientific and commercial (think near-space tourism) applications.
(Washington Post)
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