http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/10/felix-baumgartner-stratos/
Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic skydive from 23 miles up is many things: an attempt to set a record and, yes, an opportunity to sell a lot of Red Bull, but also a chance to learn more about free falling from extreme altitude - lessons that could be valuable as commercial space flight takes off. Early Tuesday morning, the Austrian adventurer will don a custom-made spacesuit and ascend high over the New Mexico desert in a capsule suspended beneath an immense helium balloon, then fall to earth from 120,000 feet. His primary goal is breaking an unofficial record Col. Joe Kittinger set with a similar leap from 102,800 feet in 1960. But, like Kittinger, Baumgartner also hopes to add to our understanding of the frontiers of flight. Baumgartner expects to exceed the speed of sound - about 700 mph at that altitude - during a free fall that will last about five minutes, something no one has ever done. For all our knowledge about high-altitude flight and space travel, there’s still a lot we don’t know about what would happen if a pilot aborts a mission and ejects at the edge of the atmosphere. The air is so thin at such heights that it is easy to tumble out of control, a situation that can lead to unconsciousness and even death. “Red Bull Stratos is an opportunity to gather information that could contribute to the development of life-saving measures for astronauts and pilots - and maybe for the space tourists of tomorrow,” Baumgartner said in a statement. “Proving that a human can break the speed of sound in the stratosphere and return to earth would be a step toward creating near-space bailout procedures that currently don’t exist.” This is not just marketing hype, even if Baumgartner did get his sponsor’s name into the quote. Kittinger’s jump at the dawn of the space age was designed to examine some of the same questions. Knowing what would happen if, say, a pilot flying the X-15 rocket airplane had to eject at 100,000 feet would be helpful for creating emergency procedures and designing flight suits. “That’s as much the case today as it was in 1960″ says Tom Crouch of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. “Maybe more so given all the talk about space tourism, with flights into the [extreme] upper atmosphere, if not into orbit yet.” Many of the sub-orbital space tourism flights being proposed by companies such as Virgin Galactic and XCOR potentially face the same questions as the rocket-powered pilots of the 1950s and ’60s. Then, as now, the United States wasn’t alone in pondering these questions. There had been a relatively quiet, relatively secret race to the edge of space since the 1920s, when balloons started reaching unprecedented altitudes. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States flew ever higher, then started racing toward the moon. The Soviets, with the Volga program, and the United States, with Project Excelsior, took pilots to the edge of the stratosphere to explore these questions. It didn’t always go as planned. When Kittinger made a jump from 76,400 feet in 1959, nobody was sure how to control a free fall at that altitude. There is so little atmosphere that there is little you can do to stabilize yourself if you begin to tumble, a situation that could be dangerous, even fatal. The goal was to develop a small pilot parachute that could be deployed early to stabilize the free fall. Kittinger became entangled in the pilot chute’s lines, went into a spin and lost consciousness. Then his main parachute failed to deploy because of the problem with the pilot chute. He came to after his reserve chute deployed, though, and landed safely. His next jump went more smoothly, and his third jump set the record that stands today at 102,800 feet. The Soviets, too, had some trouble. Whereas Kittinger simply jumped from a gondola, the Russians strapped their pilots into ejection seats to more closely simulate what might happen in an airplane or spacecraft. In 1962, Maj. Yevgenny Andreyev and Col. Pyotr Dolgov rode the Volga capsule to 83,500 feet, where Andreyev bailed out and landed safely about 7.5 minutes later. Dolgov continued climbing to nearly 94,000 feet before heading back down, but his was killed after his suit depressurized during the descent. As the space race kicked into high gear, the goal of high-altitude parachute jumps faded. Many of the questions these early programs pondered went unanswered. The questions are no less relevant today, especially at the dawn of the commercial space industry and the rise of space tourism. Virgin Galactic, XCOR and a handful of others hope to provide sub-orbital launches to anyone with the means to buy a ticket. There is no standardized plan for escaping from an aircraft or spacecraft at such high altitudes. Yes, ejection seats and parachutes are the norm for aircraft flying at lower altitudes. But they were developed after years of trial and error. There simply aren’t as many data points when it comes to high-altitude free fall, and the aerospace community will welcome any knowledge gleaned from Baumgartner’s caffeine- and taurine-funded jump. That’s not to say Sir Richard Branson or Elon Musk, let alone NASA, will base their plans on Baumgartner’s success (or failure). But the aerospace industry will be following Baumgartner’s jump, and the knowledge gleaned from it will be of interest to the engineers designing the next generation of space vehicles, and creating the emergency procedures for dealing with accidents. “It’s clearly going to become a much more important question,” Crouch says. “They surely will discover something about what happens to the human body at those speeds.” _______________________________________________ Please be sure to include a URL to the article. 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