Could someone explain to me whether this is a marketing stunt and nothing more or whether there is some substance behind this? Put another way: Will any scientists or engineers (at least potentially) learn something interesting from this?
It's cool no matter what, but it would be even cooler if there were some substance behind it.
If everything goes according to plan (I know, that's a big if), then Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and others like John Carmack's space company will be doing literally thousands of suborbital flights in the next 5 years or so. Not just tourist flights, but tons of science missions as well. Taking a step towards someone being able bail from those kind of flights is definitely useful. Very unlikely that this would be used for orbital launch anytime soon, it's way safer to abort an orbital launch in the capsule than to try and eject.
The military has also looked at using suborbital rockets to transport special forces hundreds of miles in a few minutes, then deploy them high over a hotspot quickly. So it could conceivably be useful for those purposes as well. (To be clear, these are just forward-looking conceptual studies. I'm not saying the military has these vehicles ready to go or anything like that).
Lastly, these guys are innovating on spacesuits design, which has been badly needed. Only a handful of spacesuit designs have ever been built and actually used in practice, and they were built by government entities. We're talking the slowest, most ponderous development cycles imaginable. NASA is still essentially using the same spacesuits on the space station that they first used with the shuttle in the early 1980's. Think about how many gains we've made in materials since then. The more suits we can build, test in the wild, and iterate on the better.
That might not be necessary... won't atmosphere provide enough lateral braking too? Either way, that's easier to do and requires far lesser equipment and prep than a re-entry capsule.
I don't know if you are joking or not (I'm guessing you are), but I'll take a bite at this.
Those ceramic tiles have to be placed in the right alignments to dissipate heat. So we are now talking about a rigid 'suit'. So for the rigid structure we'll need reinforcements and ways to move and handle stress and structural load at high velocities - we don't want that transmitted into the human body. (We've tested supersonic velocities, but not re-entry)
The parachute will also have to expand in size to handle the extra weight. Going down this line I we soon get to a point where we may as well call the whole thing a pod and be done with it.
All of it pretty much hinges on ceramic tiles needing to be oriented and then added structural weight.
I don't think he was saying 'from orbit.' He was saying in an emergency.
Yes, the heat from re-entry is caused by the slowing of the spacecraft's relative speed from the incredibly fast speeds of orbit, as gravity gains hold of it and pulls it even faster. If someone exited a spacecraft in space, with zero drag, and headed towards earth, they would be moving at faster than their terminal velocity and would likely burn up.
But if someone had an issue in a sub-orbital flight - or on takeoff for a space mission - bailing out could be a viable option.
(Interestingly, this is why Col. Kittinger made the jumps he made with Project Excelsior in 1960 - to test whether an astronaut with no skydiving experience in the upcoming Mercury space program could successfully escape their spacecraft in the event of an emergency during the ascent.)
50 years ago today humans went faster than the speed of sound for the very first time. Now we're slightly jaded where we think there's nothing to learn by having a human fall faster than the speed of sound in a suit?
Apparently there are some innovations in pressure suit design going on here. This will be the first time we have a supersonic skydive. This jump would be useful in verifying their models. Use cases of supersonic sky dives... pretty much limited to space launch aborts.
Use cases of supersonic sky dives... pretty much limited to space launch aborts.
There's also a lot of military applications. Most of the previous records were set by Joe Kittinger, Felix's flight communicator, in 60's as part of military research.
As an aside, we don't actually know if this truly is the first time this has been done as there's plenty of reason why the US (or even Russia perhaps) could have already done this in secret.
Yes, Kittinger is the man walking Felix through the procedures. This is the Dynamic Duo of high altitude jumping. I felt a shiver listening to them, this is a day I think I will tell my children about.
My guess is that because he went so much faster initially, he covered a further distance faster. I haven't done the math, and he definitely deployed early, but it still seems plausible to me
Does someone know the reason behind the poor quality of audio coming from Felix? You'd think they had the resources to put in a decent microphone, and data transfer -- judging by the high quality video -- shouldn't be a problem.
I often wondered about a possibly connected thing about airplane pilot's microphones:
Why is it that pilots, when addressing the fliers over intercom always have terrible sound quality? You'd think that airlines could afford a high-quality microphone considering the cost of the plane and the pilot's time. Air traffic control should appreciate quality audio as well.
There could be some ruggedness requirement to these microphones that takes precedence over audio quality. Maybe they must withstand decompression?
Maybe the raw sound input is run through a band pass filter that attenuates all noise outside of the human vocal range. This would make the voice sound "bad" but it would actually make it clearer to understand, especially in noisy environments.
One of the crazy things is that if you listen to ATC feeds long enough, you stop being aware of the 'quality issue'.
EDIT: if you're interested, you can go right here! http://www.liveatc.net/
I transcribed hours of this stuff as part of a research project. The first 4 or so hours were really rough. After that, it got easier, with the majority of issues being that seemingly one in 20 aircraft actually have horrendous audio pickup, and accents.
yea I heard that too, and then the live feed stopped working as they were talking about the problem... freaked me out! But the feed is back on now.... Was the heating fixed?
(edit: the feed cutting was probably just me, just saying it was an unfortunate time for it to do so)
edit 2: They just said that the problem is specifically for the visor (to prevent fogging and icing), not the whole helmet... They still haven't found out what's wrong.
Just incredible to watch something like that live. Held my breath the whole time, particular through free fall. When you see him sitting up there from 120,000 feet like he's on a rocking chair, it sort of puts into perspective any time you think you were brave in your life!
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Amazing, isn't it. YouTube started in 2005 and 7 years later it is a distribution platform for live high quality video to more people than watch most broadcast/cable TV.
At first glance, skydiving from 10k feet and 100k feet seem like they wouldn't be any different. I'm sure there are intricacies that make the jump very difficult, but it seems like you just let gravity do the work, and the chute automatically deploys for you. Can anyone help me understand what the intricacies are?
EDIT: nevermind, seeing him spin but regain control removed my doubt of the difficulty.
Multicast requires all the intermediate routers support it, I thought. Is that really the case? I can't imagine big routers at ISPs allowing multicast.
I think this is a perfectly fair debate, with good points on both sides. It's similar to the incredibly ironic sponsorship of sporting events by tobacco and fast food companies. Or perhaps to Bill Gates using illegal monopolistic methods to impose the Windows Tax on the world and then spending the wealth saving lives.
These are deep issues to ponder about morality, touching on Ends vs. Means, although that may be OT for HN. But Felix's ambition is somewhat noble, even if RedBull's sponsorship may not be.
It's interesting, for sure. But the goal is to get you to drink more Red Bull. It's a very unique ad, but still an ad. For a sugary beverage people should probably actually be drinking less of, not more.
They're going to be spending money to sell their sugary beverage one way or another, but it's cool they're doing it in a way that will advance the state of science rather than just polluting the world with more billboard ads.
But, will it advance the state of science? Maybe if he actually goes to Mach 1 that could prove interesting but otherwise the "science" part of that whole thing makes me cringe.
For example they put the "edge of space" at 36km (it's actually usually considered to be at ~100km), there is no explanation for such gross errors except that they want to market the crap out of this.
While you care it's not the edge of space, and I care, do your mother care? Does she know the difference between the two, or is 128,000 feet just really high, and might as well be outer space. If anyone does figure it out, well yeah it's a marketing spin, but it doesn't discount what he did and what it took to get there.
But with such a huge spin on it, people will not only miss an opportunity to be educated on what he actually did, they are actively being misled about it. I just can't stand such rubbish tactics.
The jump height is just one particular point that I noticed, and it was a point where they seemed to deliberately put a lot of spin on it in a couple of places:
1) They consistently called it "edge of space". It's a lot closer to an airliners flight height than the edge of space (100km).
2) Their consistent use of fish-eye lenses for the outside imagery made it seem like you can actually see the earth's curvature, conjuring up images of space-flight.
3) Whenever he talked with Kittinger on the ground, they background animation showed a rotating earth from LEO.
Together this all seems to mislead an unsuspecting viewer into believing that he jumped from somewhere a lot higher. What's wrong with being honest about it being 39km and nowhere near space?
On a logarithmic scale I can easily get halfway to the top of Mount Everest by walking onto some hill. Doesn't mean I should claim I went there.
It seems the highest a balloon ever went was 53km. SpaceShipOne went to the 100km and it took them a lot more effort. The altitude record for jet aircraft is 37,650m, this is about the same as the height he jumped from and seems be a better comparison to me.
But there are much worse (debatable) products that spend money on really shitty ad campaigns. So this isn't really bad.
I personally respect Red Bull for having found a niche (crazy adventure sports of all sorts) and making possible whole careers in these amazing sports.
At the end of the day, not a lot of people believe you NEED Red Bull to make this jump, but thousands of kids around the world are being inspired right this minute.
I agree, but then I get worried that the same kids don't understand what sponsorship means, and that they'll assume that drinking Red Bull is what people like this do, and then they'll start up a very unhealthy and addictive habit (drinking lots of Red Bull). Which is pretty bad.
I think you underestimate kids' intelligence. I would worry about constant bombardment from the TV, and product placement in all their favorite shows far more than an event like this :)
Not just financed by Guiness, but they thought that it gave them a competitive advantage. I doubt falling at Mach 1 will give Red Bull a competitive advantage. In fact it directly contradicts their marketing :) (Red Bull gives you wings...)
The original scheduled launch on the morning of 9 October 2012 was delayed and cancelled because of a 25-mile-per-hour (40 km/h) gust of wind at the launch site. Technicians at the launch site also found that one of the capsule's communications radio was faulty.
I am having terrible problems using youtube to view the live stream. I am getting "stops" for about 5-10 seconds constantly. Sometimes I have to refresh the whole youtube page to get it working again. Earlier they said that over 100 sites are streaming the event... does anybody know about the best working site?
Yes, he will slow down the higher he gets. What's driving him up is the difference in density between the Helium inside his balloon and the air outside. The atmosphere becomes less dense with increasing altitude, so the density difference, and thus the buoyancy decreases as well.
Not sure about ascending too fast, I'd imagine at high speeds there's a risk of damaging the balloon due to wind.
Once again, title creators succumb to the power of relativity. My eyes keep on skimming on this topic, and it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. "Today" is awesome.
Not as likely as it sounds. There has been at least one case of a SR-71 pilot ejecting at speed/altitude and making a "safe" ejection, and without everything being torn off. It all depends on the dynamic pressure which is a combination of speed and air density.
I thought even at that altitude there would still be a significant amount of atmosphere but apparently not. Even 39km there's still a lot of atmosphere to go but I guess it's pretty thin.
When interviewed Kittinger said something "To all those who said Baumgartner suit would tear apart I salute you with a middle finger!" I laughed but thought it was unnecessary harsh since at some point he may enter thicker atmospheric region going 1,340km/h.
The design of aircraft are angled to near points and aircraft skin of supersonic craft are made of exotic materials to withstand thousands of degrees Celsius. I figured Mach 1 in a bulky suit thin atmosphere or not at some point something may tear, give way or heat up suddenly.
To Red Bull: fix your coverage next time! Your website and Twitter feeds weren't really ever carrying the latest information pre-launch, and your blog was 24 hours out-of-date whenever I checked. (Also YouTube was buffering, it wasn't my connection). Bit of a mess from the PR-masters imo.
I really dislike comments like this. What happened today was an impressive technical achievement by any measure, and for me at least, one of the most nail bitingly tense things I've ever seen broadcast, and yet we still get people calling it a "bit of a mess", criticizing utterly trivial issues, because that's all they can criticize.
Perhaps YouTube was buffering because of the MILLIONS of people watching this amazing event? PR mess? You've got to be kidding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_X-1