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Skydiver To Break Sound Barrier During Free-Fall
Hugh Pickens writes "Over fifty years ago, American Joe Kittinger made history by leaping from a balloon at 102,800 ft, and although many have sought to repeat the feat, all have failed. Now, BBC reports that Austrian extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner will try to break the long-standing record for the highest ever parachute jump, skydiving from a balloon sent to at least 120,000 ft, and it is likely that 35 seconds into in his long free-fall of more than five minutes, he will exceed the speed of sound — the first person to do so without the aid of a machine. 'No-one really knows what that will be like,' says Baumgartner. Although challenges in the endeavor include coping with freezing temperatures and ultra-thin air, a key objective for Baumgartner will be to try to maintain a good attitude during the descent and prevent his body from going into a spin and blacking out. 'The fact is you have a lot of different airflows coming around your body; and some parts of your body are in supersonic flow and some parts are in transonic flow. What kind of reaction that creates, I can't tell you,' adds Baumgartner."
It's really going to hurt.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It will really fuck you up.
-- Will Farrell
Funny... breaking the sound barrier when there is no sound
So I guess I'm not the only one to think this guy is going to die doing this stunt.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Just like car racing, I want to watch.
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Am I the only one that though of the space diving scene from Star Trek 11?
A suicide mission with great importance for science. Finally the long lasting question of what happens to the human body at +1 mach will be answered.
Failed?!? How can you fail that? Throw yourself self off the balloon and miss the ground?
/greger
... will he bounce?
Finally a use for my man-sized styrofoam wings!
he will exceed the speed of sound — the first person to do so without the aid of a machine.
He's using a machine. It's a balloon that sends him up 120,000 ft.
Test the survivability of this by using a dummy with G-force sensors (just like we see on Mythbusters).
Then, if all goes well - try the stunt.
And please, use some kind of stabilizer to make sure you don't turn into a frisbee.
I do see potential in this 'experiment' if anyone ever needs to bail out on spaceship2.
I'm going to guess that he doesn't break the sound barrier. The term "barrier" isn't entirely fanciful, as power required to go faster increases enormously as you approach it.
On the other hand, if he DOES break the sound barrier, I'm going to bet it does him some injury.
gravity is not a machine ... and that is what propels him to the required speed
the balloon has zero to do with his fall other than lifting him to the altitude
it does not make him go fast
I realize that Terminal Velocity will be higher with less air density, and the speed of sound should be lower, but do they both change so much that this is actually possible?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Isn't "terminal velocity" lower than the speed of sound?
During the fall, how far could he drift from the balloon's overhead position? A few miles? Tens of miles?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Pretty good information about high-altitude skydiving here: Speed of a Skydiver
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If you fart while exceeding the speed of sound, will it make a noise?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I think this has to be considered as a Darwin Awards nominee...
Strictly speaking the record will be for highest parachute jump. Assuming he's alive when he jumps he should get the record, even if he lands in several pieces.
Aside from the air friction, it's going to jolt like hell when his chute opens and he starts to decelerate.
" a key objective for Baumgartner will be to try to maintain a good attitude during the descent"
At first glance, I thought I saw "maintain a good ALTITUDE". Jumping out of the balloon would all but dash any hope of that. That being said, I'd have to say that my attitude would be pretty piss poor as I froze my privates off while descending at super sonic speed.
As a commercial airline pilot I will say that these stunts disturb me. We have always had to worry about birds being sucked into the engines. Now we have to worry about humans falling from the sky. And there's not much latitude to maneuver a commercial airplane with an approaching target going faster than the speed of sound. Even if we do miss, it will likely spook the kiddies sitting in the window seats.
UTW
I hope to god he's not wearing a red shirt.
The Difference between a bad golfer and a bad skydiver? one goes *Whack*... "D@mn". the other goes "D@mn"...Whack.
Is 3rd person life insurance legal in Australia?
I mean they only ask if one has dangerous hobbies like sky diving, right? They probably don't ask if you are doing super sonic skydiving...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
What can possibly go wrong?? /. memo
A rifle might have a muzzle velocity of something like 3000 ft/sec, the falling bullet may have a terminal velocity of something like 300 or 400 ft/sec. The idea that a bullet will fall down at the same speed it was fired is inaccurate. (This does not mean that falling bullets cannot be dangerous).
Damnit, we've lived in fear of them going 600 miles an hour in airplanes and crashing into things. Now what the fuck are we going to do when they start falling from the sky at 800 miles an hour?!
Will that still apply at extreme altitude as friction, and ergo drag, is going to be a lot lower due to thinner air?
Regardless rather him than me... also the comment from him regarding bits of his body being in a transonic and some in supersonic airflow makes me wonder if he's going to arrive in one or multiple pieces....
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
OK, it was a deleted scene. And I think it involved actual orbital reentry in just a jumpsuit. Still, I suspect that if this guy survives, he will eventually end up attempting something like that. Does Virgin Galactic sell one-way tickets?
I think he's going to burst his eardrums, and possibly some organs.
Look. this is going to be an enormous pressure wave that will saturate his body. He pops this barrier, it's going to rattle him pretty fierce.
They really should try this with a dummy first!
You can always tell because they have that Sun logo in their favicon.
Advice: on VPS providers
are they really sure they know what they are doing?
first in case of human bodies air resistance tends to balance out gravity way before mach 1, you would need a shell with very good aerodynamics
secondly, if(and its a very big if) the fall gets anywhere near mach 1 it will hurt, not for long tho, death should come soon. people behind this seem to forget lessons learned with the breaking of sound barrier. supersonic flows mean shockwaves strong enough to tear up airplanes.
i would recommend throwing crash test dummy first
Terminal velocity is cause by the resistance of the air equaling the force of gravity. Well, up higher you've got less air. Of course that also affects the speed of sound.
He most likely will vibrate to death... they should test it first with a real doll.
> Slowing from 1200+ fps to 120 fps is a big deal and
Wow, that's some quick rendering! But why is it a big deal to slow it down?
Hope this guy gets his record... America made this record to test space suits for manned space flight over 50 years ago while advancing manned space flight... This guy just wants a record.
They say they are testing a new suit... Uhhh kinda... But it's kinda made just for this purpose. Funny how the Brits glorify
themselves in all their documentaries. Watched one on flight and they almost discarded the Wright Bros. Watched one on
Colossus and the made Alan Turing look like nothing. SOUR GRAPES.... SOUR ISLAND
I'm sure you'll find plenty of results if you search for things that get more stiff the more they're blown on.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Kittinger was a contestant on the "What's My Line" game show in 1956, in honor of an earlier altitude record he set in a balloon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNFH1Ds0rU4
Very personable guy; there's a brief interview with him afterwards.
This would really only be interesting if no gear other than a parachute was used.
I wonder if the air resistance at that speed would crush him without re-enforcement gear.
... how high ?
composed of laminar flow of air molecules around surface of the balloon
and although many have sought to repeat the feat, all have failed.
Isn't this one of those thing that you either succeed or you die?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Interviewer: "Is that your crash helmet?"
Jose' Jimenez: " . . . oh I hope not."
Using:
standard atmosphere http://www.desktopaero.com/stdatm.html
Mach/altitude tables http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/atmosphere/q0112.shtml
g acceleration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity
and historical stuff on Col Joe.
At 35 seconds he'll have fallen from 120kft to 80kft, going 1126 ft/s. That's Mach 1 at sea level. At 80kft it's Mach 1.15, giving some room for drag error. 10 seconds later he'd cross from stratosphere to tropopause where Mach 1 is lowest, but since it's only a matter of ~6 ft/s, this just gives him room to fall farther if need be but not required. At 80kft the dynamic pressure will be around 55 lb/ft^2, so if fully loaded he weighs more than 165 lbs he'll still accelerate some, but not after the 45 second mark. If he's outfitted like Kittenger was, he'll weigh up towards 300 lbs, and would still accelerate for some time.
At 30 seconds he'll be falling at 965 ft/s, or Mach 0.98, well within the narrow transonic region of highest pressure, "max Q". This is where aircraft prior to the Bell X-1 came apart due to the buffeting of turbulence combined with the growing bow shock pressure wave.
He can do it theoretically. The altitude is just about perfect for the attempt. I'm more concerned about whether he'll be able to keep from getting the piss kicked out of him at the Mach line. Sure, it'll be slight compared to what General Chuck punched through, but he's a damn sight slighter than the X-1. On the other hand Kittenger hit Mach 0.96 around 60kft and I see no report of this effect so maybe it's not a problem.
It may still be a problem to punch through though. There's a spike in the speed/drag curve that's greater or lesser depending on the drag characteristics (coefficient of drag of cD). If his outfit will be shaped to approximate a low cD body so much the better. Since he'll require some form of protection I doubt anyone would fault him for choosing a shape to fit his flight profile.
If he kept up his falling profile he's still slow to terminal velocity for the lower altitude, around 200 MPH, slower still if he's either braking or blacked out and spinning. Lower altitude here is taken to be where he could pop the chute and stay conscious even if he lost his mask, around 20 kft. At that altitude and speed a full open would be quite a jerk, but no more than airborne troops practice, and which I'm sure he's handled previously. If he's designing his chute to be able to be opened higher/faster should he need or want to, he'll include a drogue chute with a delay before the main, to slow him gradually to safe opening speed (especially helpful if spinning).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Ummm...whatever happened to terminal velocity? Can the human body even break the sound barrier? I was taught in High School physics that the human body had a terminal velocity of about 120mp/h.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just rather curious.
that breaks the sound barrier, the brown note
Won't a high drag suit also help him stabilize himself to avoid going in to a spin? He'll need the surface area (provided by a high drag suit) where the air is thinner, I think.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
FAA restricted airspace, ground level to 120,000' due to crazy guy jumping from balloon. Radius 100 nautical miles.
Some footage from the original Kittinger jump are incorporated in this awesome music video by Boards of Canada:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xN3t1fSbnc
If they don't work, he'll have slowed down to low-altitude terminal velocity. But if everything works, he'll be landing at normal parachute-landing speed, so he may bounce a bit when he first touches down.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As he exits the plain, there being less atmosphere will skip him across the roof of the planet's shell and into space. No doubt his oxygen tanks will keep him alive longer than needed, just so his suit and skin super-freeze and super-heat at the same time from interacting with drifting pockets of elemental gases in outer space. His oxygen-tank will rupture and fuel an explosion that hurtles his freeze-dried corpse deeper into space. It'll be whittled-down with every collision until all that is left gets attracted to orbit around the Moon. Maybe one forgotten Day of Middle Earth will emerge to reclaim the former catastrophic 2012 flooded-plaints with it's over-populants from the inner-sun. As they study the stars, they'll note an orbiting buiskit with a remarkable resemblance of one of their phylosophers and see it draw smaller objects near with it's own mass of Brownian Motion. They'll call it someone's son as it orbits Planet Earth, and an emboldened tax collector will take-over a church as the first Pope on Earth with a new phylosophy that this orbitting Sun orbits Planet Earth.
It will be epic, until someone reads the book, so we'll outlaw oral law this time because we know it'll convince people to break oral law and neglect written law by us using the reverse-psychology aspect of a rebellious generation. Everyone will be ignorant this time, because we outlawed all the unrelated matters.
That's a great question, to be resolved soon!
I'd like to know similar. Say he's moving 800 MPH in very little atmosphere, when suddenly he hits a layer of denser atmosphere that restricts his speed down to 700 MPH within a couple seconds. That's got to be like a bullet pushing through jello in some ways, but wouldn't the rate of change be equivalent of punching a fist through wood? If this is not so because of gradual atmospheric resistance, then consider how going 800 MPH through a dark cloud would be much more dangerous than a gradual atmospheric resistance change. Those clouds are starting to look like sandbags...all of a sudden...
, he will exceed the speed of sound — the first person to do so without the aid of a machine.
/facepalm
Joe Kittinger already did this. I'd hope that the footage is on youtube as I saw it in college.
So all the questions about what will happen have already been answered.
I want to see the scene from the movie "Heavy Metal" performed in real life. A car (not just any car, a 57-ish 'vette) drops from the shuttle, survives re-entry (with a little help from the windshield wipers to clear the char/ash), lands safely, and drives off!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.