By now you have no doubt heard that Felix Baumgartner has shattered several records with his successful sky dive on October 14, 2012. Fearless Felix stepped off of his perch, fell freely for 4 min 18 sec, and then pulled his parachute, coasting safely to the surface about five minutes later.
The lead up to the historic event was similar to that of a rocket launch, complete with weather delays. This jump was originally set for October 8, but on several occasions, it got bumped. You know you are involved in something risky when a little too much wind is cause for serious worry.
Imagine you are Felix, and you wake up on October 8, having probably not slept much the night before, ready for the leap of your life. You down a few red bulls, get your adrenalin up, and then some guy in a lab coat gives you the news that the jump must be postponed. Repeat this a few more times, and you just might go mad. I do not know this for certain, but I would imagine that a psychologist was on site with Baumgartner to help him maintain his mental well-being through this go/no-go roller coaster that lasted more than a week.
Many videos of the dive have circulated on YouTube, though most have been yanked by the sponsor (Red Bull). Here is their 90 second summary of the event.
One can only imagine what it must have been like to look down from 128,000 ft (8,000 ft more than originally planned), and to behold the planet. From that altitude, one can begin to get a sense of the Earth's curvature. With a final salute (to his family, and mankind I suppose), Baumgartner stepped off from his pod and quickly vanished from view.
Based on some of the information given in the video, as well as some educated guesses, I have constructed approximate graphs of Baumgartner's speed and altitude as a function of time for the free-fall portion of his descent.
(Note that it is possible to generate theoretical results by solving the governing equation numerically, but as I do not have access to the particular parameters associated with his specially designed space suit, such as mass and drag coefficient, I elected to plot these 'experimentally')
