Ordinarily, Felix Baumgartner would not need a lot of practice in the science of falling.REPEAT:
He has jumped off two of the tallest buildings in the world, as well as the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro (a 95-foot leap for which he claimed a low-altitude record for parachuting). He has sky-dived across the English Channel. He once plunged into the black void of a 623-foot-deep cave, which he formerly considered the most difficult jump of his career.
But now Fearless Felix, as his fans call him, has something more difficult on the agenda: jumping from a helium balloon in the stratosphere at least 120,000 feet above Earth. Within about half a minute, he figures, he would be going 690 miles per hour and become the first skydiver to break the speed of sound.
... Plenty of planes have broken the sound barrier, but transonic humans are a mystery, said Art Thompson, the technical project director for the Red Bull Stratos mission, and a former Northrop engineer who worked on the B-2 stealth bomber.
“You can run a lot of models, but with the human body you’re not dealing with a hard surface or a ballistic shape,” Mr. Thompson said. “You’ve got this rounded bulbous helmet, and the shoulders and the feet sticking out, and everything starts to happen at different times. Parts of your body may be going supersonic while others aren’t, causing flutter waves pulling back and forth among the surfaces.”
Could such waves harm the body? Could they create disastrous turbulence?
“We just don’t know what will happen to Felix and the suit when he goes supersonic,” said another Stratos engineer, Mike Todd, who worked on high-altitude suits for the Air Force’s spy-plane pilots with the renowned Skunk Works research division of Lockheed. “Felix could slip right through it, but if half the suit’s supersonic and the other half isn’t, there could be turbulence that knocks him out of control.”
Such risks are one reason why Mr. Kittinger’s record has stood for half a century. Air Force and NASA officials have become understandably reluctant to explain potential mishaps to Congressional committees.
... But private adventurers have more freedom to take their own risks.
... more freedom to take their own risks.
THIS IS WHY PRIVATE ENTERPRISE ALWAYS OUTPERFORMS GOVERNMENT "ENTERPRISE".
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