PHOTOS: Felix Baumgartner Breaks The Speed Of Sound

by UInterviewOctober 15, 2012, 12:00 amNews >

Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner, 43, became the first man to break the speed of sound in freefall on Sunday. Baumgartner, a skydiving expert, also broke two other world records — highest free fall and highest manned balloon flight — as he took a helium-filled balloon to an altitude of 128,100 feet (almost 25 miles), and jumped out of his space capsule from the stratosphere. During his 4:20 minute long free fall, Baumgartner reached an estimated speed of approximately 834 mph, or Mach 1.24. "Sometimes you have to go really high to see how small you are," Baumgartner said, just before diving into thin air.

But the leap was not without its fair share of anxiety. As millions of people watched the jump live on their televisions and online streams, the freefalling Baumgartner began to spin in mid-air — a worrisome development that can be lethal. "It was an incredible up and down today, just like it's been with the whole project," said Baumgartner after landing. "First we got off with a beautiful launch and then we had a bit of drama with a power supply issue to my visor. The exit was perfect but then I started spinning slowly. I thought I'd just spin a few times and that would be that, but then I started to speed up. It was really brutal at times. I thought for a few seconds that I'd lose consciousness. I didn't feel a sonic boom because I was so busy just trying to stabilize myself. We'll have to wait and see if we really broke the sound barrier. It was really a lot harder than I thought it was going to be."

Fortunately, Baumgartner's barely audible voice croaked through the transmitter shortly after, announcing that his visor had fogged up but that he had regained control — a testament to the five years of training and preparation that he and the team poured into the mission, with the goal of not just breaking records, but also learning about the body's copying mechanisms in the extreme conditions of space. "In many ways, Felix was standing on the shoulders of giants," Margaret Weitekamp, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, told the Detroit Free Press. "Baumgartner himself will be advancing the science of how the human body responds to the upper atmosphere, just as many test pilots did before him." Relief soon flooded Mission Control in New Mexico, where both the Red Bull Stratos crew behind the project and Baumgartner's own family, including girlfriend Nicole Oetl, applauded the skydiver's safe landing.

No doubt a giant leap for man, Baumgartner's world records are now pending certification by authorized governing bodies. The jump also coincided with the 65 year anniversary of Chuck Yeager's own record-setting descent, during which he became the first man to break the sound barrier by flying in a rocket-powered airplane.

If you missed the live jump, check out this video recap of the mission: