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| Holy @#$% |
In case you missed it, Austrian Felix Baumgartner attached a capsule to some balloons, went up 24 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, and then tossed himself out and over the side of the capsule with naught but a parachute between himself and the record for largest crater formed by a human body.
It was AMAZING.
He was in free fall for minutes, although he did not break the record for most time in free fall (personal record: 0.05 seconds off the side of a curb this morning). He did break the record for speed and height, and it was all pretty exciting to see a man jump from 24 miles up and casually cruise in, landing on his feet.
Felix Baumgartner, we at the Signal Watch salute you and your titanium-plated brass-ones. That was a feat of derring-do the likes of which one sees but once in a blue moon.
It did seem the ground crew was doing a terrifically incompetent job with Gartner on his way down, relaying bad information and failing to understand him when he spoke. It seems they should have been feeding him data the whole fall, but they didn't. I look forward to whatever National Geographic or Discovery channel doc gets made out of this whole event so we can learn what really happened.
Absolutely cool. Glad people are still pushing the limits.
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| Awesome! Now, let's go get some WAFFLES. |
6 comments:
It was amazing wasn't it? I ended up crashing the browser on my wife's laptop when I tried to watch it so I missed some of the jump. Regardless it is an incredible feat.
The National Geographic Channel and the BBC combined forces on creating a documentary of the 4 year lead up to the jump. We should see the finished product sometime in November.
The title of this post should have been "Felix Baumgartner Space Jumps into My Heart"
Ah, man. Now I'll always have a little regret about this post...
Jamie and I watched yesterday. She'd heard nothing about the attempt, so she thought it was being faked at first, then it was some weird Flugtag thing, and so we did some quick explaining just as Felix exited the capsule.
I hadn't heard of it either. Or, rather, I had seen mention of it on Twitter but thought it wasn't real or that it was some regular skydive.
I hopped on the live feed yesterday just before he jumped and was freaked. the hell. out. That view is insane, as is the dude in the little portal thinamajiggie. I was terrified it would end badly on live feed, but it was actually sort of anticlimactic watching the blue dot on the screen until he actually came a bit closer to earth. So strange. But really cool.
The dot was just a reminder to me of how small he was against the sky. I didn't feel comfortable until he came into better focus, and then you could see him teetering. Scary stuff.
At one point our space capsules were dots, too, and that's what I kept thinking of. This guy just lived that space-jump scene from the recent Star Trek movie. How crazy is that?
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