Skydiving from 30 Kilometers
January 20, 2006
Some folks are a lot tougher than I am.
From this post:
In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger flew 30km straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon. This very nearly made him the first man in space.
He then jumped.
Kittinger free-fell for over twenty miles at which point he was moving so fast he broke the sound barrier.
He had all but left the earth’s atmosphere; the sky around him was pitch black; he could see the outlines of entire continents; and the haiku-like abstraction of his available reference points — earth, balloon, space — made it impossible to tell if he was really falling.
What’s really awesome, though is the film footage Kittinger shot on his way down.
