Skyfall: Felix Baumgartner Describes His Record-Breaking Jump

October 15, 2012 from Telegraph.co.uk

Felix Baumgartner speaks of the emotional strain after his record-breaking skydive that saw him fall faster than the speed of sound. Preliminary figures show the Austrian skydiver reached a maximum speed of 833.9 miles per hour (1,342 kilometers per hour). That amounts to Mach 1.24, which is faster than the speed of sound. No one has ever reached that speed wearing only a high-tech suit. Baumgartner said that traveling faster than sound was "hard to describe." With no reference points, "you don't know how fast you travel," he said after the jump. The altitude he leaped from also marked the highest ever for a skydiver -- more than three times the height of the average cruising altitude for a jetliner. At Baumgartner's insistence, some 30 cameras on the capsule, the ground and a helicopter recorded the event on Sunday. While it had been pegged as a live broadcast, organizers said was actually under a 20-second delay in case of a tragic accident.

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Felix Baumgartner

Felix Baumgartner is an Austrian skydiver, daredevil and BASE jumper. He set the world record for skydiving an estimated 39 kilometres, reaching an estimated speed of 1357.64 km/h, or Mach 1.25, on 14 October 2012, and became the first person to break the sound barrier without... Explore this topic

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In Newtonian physics, free fall is any motion of a body where its weight is the only force acting upon it. In the context of General Relativity where gravitation is reduced to a space-time curvature, a body in free fall has no force acting on it and it moves along a geodesic. ... Explore this topic

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The sound barrier, in aerodynamics, is the point at which an object moves from transonic to supersonic speed. The term, which occasionally has other meanings, came into use during World War II, when a number of aircraft started to encounter the effects of compressibility, a co... Explore this topic

Speed of sound

The speed of sound is the distance travelled during a unit of time by a sound wave propagating through an elastic medium. In dry air at 20 °C, the speed of sound is 343.2 metre per second. This is 1,236 kilometres per hour, or about one kilometer in three seconds or approximat... Explore this topic

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Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional... Explore this topic

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Parachuting, or skydiving, is the action sport of exiting an aircraft and returning to Earth with the aid of gravity while using a parachute to slow down during the terminal part of the descent. It may or may not involve a certain amount of free-fall, a time during which the p... Explore this topic

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The United States of America, commonly called the United States or America, is a federal republic consisting of fifty states and a federal district. The lower forty-eight contiguous states and the federal district of Washington, D.C. are in central North America between Canada... Explore this topic

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