Stratos Jump

[Jammrock]

Felix is about to open the door and jump from ~39km up. Going through the checklist now.

http://www.redbullstratos.com/live/

EDIT: That was crazy! He was spinning so badly I thought his break shoot was going to deploy. Est. 700+ mph free fall. Pulled his shoot early and missed the freefall record (length of time in freefall) by about 20 seconds. His visor was fogging up and I think he was too stress from the speed of the decent and spin to wait any longer.

[degrub]

got the altitude record though. Maybe on velocity. Might have been what made him start tumbling - couldn't shed the shock wave.

[cjolley]

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/14/us/skydiver-record-attempt/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Still, even Baumgartner seemed taken aback when Utley detailed how fast he had fallen at one point -- 833.9 mph, or Mach 1.24

[Jammrock]

I don't doubt it. He was going down so fast the cameras couldn't track him. The speed gauge on the broadcast was flying all over the place. MACH 1.24 is damn impressive...in a crazy sort of way.

Still can't get over that horizontal spin. He pulled out of it pretty deftly though.

[Umfriend]

Funny that, if you're trying to break both the speed during as the length of freefall, then you have an optimization problem.

[VJ]

The spin looked quite scary... then again, imagine the force needed just to lift an arm, with a relative wind of such a speed (even if it is less dense). He recovered beautifully though. I wonder when (if) we get to see the helmet camera recording from the jump.

Umfriend: I was thinking the same! Perhaps he will do it again to get the freefall record? They have the capsule and everything...
(maybe Virgin could buy in to it, and organize duo-jumps... )

[Brian Ellis]

Crazy gonk! The heights people will go to so that they have their name in the Guinness Book of Records!

[Dr Mordrid]

There's a group working on a one-up of this - a SpaceDive from above the Karman Line, the defined boundary of space which is 100 km / 62 miles. Besides a safety feature during suborbital flights and launches this would be a ramping up to being able to bail out of an orbiting spacecraft, which would have saved the Columbia crew. One of the proponents is the husband of one of her astronauts.

[cjolley]

...to being able to bail out of an orbiting spacecraft, which would have saved the Columbia crew.

Well, to be fair, they didn't know they needed saving until it was too late.
But with the new procedures in place for checking ship integrity it would have.

I wonder how long it would take to get from the ISS to the ground without heating up a space suit too much?

[VJ]

Wouldn't you just keep orbiting if you bail out of the ISS? Or at least end up in a slowly decaying orbit that would last for quite some time? And wouldn't the orbiting speed be a problem? Remember, Baumgartner had almost no horizontal speed...

[cjolley]

Of course you would have to retro enough to start dropping in the first place.

My question was about how long it would take to get down without overheating the suit.
The orbital kinetic energy has to be shed, but I don't think it has to be shed quickly like it is in a capsule or a shuttle descent necessarily.

PS I should have said "kinetic and potential energy". That's a pretty long drop.

[Dr Mordrid]

Well, to be fair, they didn't know they needed saving until it was too late.
But with the new procedures in place for checking ship integrity it would have.

I wonder how long it would take to get from the ISS to the ground without heating up a space suit too much?

NASA explored orbital bailout back in the early 1960's with an inflatable heat shield named MOOSE (man out of space easiest) but the materials science wasn't there, but now it is. MOOSE had a small thruster to do a de-orbit burn, enough life support for a couple of orbits and a conical shape when inflated. A modern (as yet unmanned) version of an inflatable heat shield (ballute) uses ceramic fabrics, gas fired into the plasma stream through pores in the fabric for active cooling and it has been successfully tested.

MOOSE (Man Out Of Space; Easiest)


Modern testbed

[/quote]