Sonic Skydive's Real Aim Is To Help Astronauts Survive

mattnyc99 writes "Earlier this year came reports that Felix Baumgartner (the daredevil who flew across the English Channel) would be attempting to jump from a balloon at least 120,000 feet altitude, break the sound barrier, and live. Now comes a big investigative story from Esquire's issue on achieving the impossible, which details the former NASA team dedicated to making sure Baumgartner's Stratos project will instruct the future safety of manned space flight (including Jonathan Clark, the husband of an astronaut who died in the Columbia disaster). From the article (which also includes pics and video shot by the amateur space photographer we've discussed here before): 'that's also precisely what makes Stratos great. It's more like Mercury than the shuttle: They're taking risks, making things up as they go along. But they're also doing important work, potentially groundbreaking work. They're doing what NASA no longer has the balls to do. Hell, he'd do it for free. He is doing it for free. Stratos only picks up his travel expenses. Clark looks at his friend, shrugs. "This is new space."'"

Comments

Project Excelsior

[elrous0]

For those who like this sort of thing, you might want to read up on Project Excelsior. Men have been doing those edge-of-space dives since the 60's. As part of that project, Joseph Kittinger jumped from 102,800 ft. Pretty amazing accomplishment for 1960 to even get up that high, much less jump from there.

Re:Project Excelsior

[MozeeToby]

Well, people did these kinds of jumps as far back as the 60's. That's not quite the same as saying that people have been doing them for that long since no one has done extreme high altitude jumps since then. In other words, the people who know the risks, problems, and solutions that they are likely to encounter are all retired or dead. A lot of the information and technology is being rediscovered and reinvented. They know that this jump is possible because someone did a jump from nearly as high 50 years ago, that knowledge lets them push forward with more confidence than they would otherwise have but it doesn't really help them solve problems when they come up.

Re:Project Excelsior

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA. First off, the guy who did the 100k ft jump is alive and consulting on the new jump. Second, they don't know this jump is possible, because jumping from 150,000 feet involved breaking the sound barrier, which no one's ever done before.

Re:Mrs. Jonathan Clark?

[__aagctu1952]

(including Jonathan Clark, the husband of an astronaut who died in the Columbia disaster)

So wait. Was this 'Jonathan Clark' a woman? Or was the 'astronaut' gay? Is this a weird typo?

Are you for real? You do know that women can be astronauts too, right?
The crew of STS-107 consisted of 5 men and 2 women. One of those was Laurel Clark.

unclear how mangled astronauts were in accidents

[peter303]

Due to privacy rights we wont know that for 75 years. But Columbia was a Science Mission and some of experiment trays survived re-entry. Some computer disks could even be read. I heard from talks by the P.I.s in my area there was about 75% experiment success rate and special publication of results. But most of that was due to telemetried data before the accident.

Red Bull, anyone?

[VTI9600]

I find it odd that the summary neither links to nor mentions the official project page. Perhaps the author has something against Red Bull (or that it uses MS Silverlight). In any case, this is the Red Bull Stratos project, not the Baumgartner Stratos Project. This is some pretty exciting stuff...Besides being totally bad-ass, Kittinger's original jump paved the way for manned space exploration. It may seem tacky to some, but credit should be given where credit is due, and as Red Bull is the primary sponsor of the project, they deserve to be mentioned.

Re:Red Bull, anyone?

[Burger-Eater]

That jump wasn't done in the U.S. Also, the USPA can't ban anyone from doing anything, the FAA however can pull a pilots license for allowing divers to pull bandit jumps like this. That jump has been done many many times since the 80's but most people only know about Pastrana's.

Video of Kittinger Jumping

[catchblue22]

Here is a music video by Boards of Canada, in which they show the original footage of Joseph Kittinger jumping from 102,800 ft. Much of the last part of the video is from something else, but the first part is real. It really is haunting to see him push off of the balloon platform.

Re:Video of Kittinger Jumping

[gandhi_2]

The real trip is, with the rarefied atmosphere there was no sound. When he jumped, he wasn't even sure he was falling to the earth or just floating around. Only when he managed to see the balloon getting smaller and smaller "above" him did he feel better.

Not quite...

[Angst Badger]

Jumping from a nearly stationary start at 100,000 feet is a very different proposition than reentering the atmosphere at orbital speed. Objects don't burn up just because they're falling through the atmosphere; they burn up because they're entering the atmosphere at very high speeds. I forget the exact value -- LEO isn't my specialty -- but objects in low Earth orbit are traveling somewhere north of 14,000 mph. (Meteors coming in from interplanetary space have even faster velocities measured in km/sec.) A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.

Re:Not quite...

[harlows_monkeys]

If humans can survive at, say, 1000 mph entering the atmosphere, that still implies you have only 100 something miles (or maybe less) to decelerate around 13000 mph. I don't know whether or not this would cause problems, but I'm guessing in order for that to happen, organs are going to get squished

14000 mph to 1000 mph over a distance of 100 miles would be 12.3 g deceleration for 48 seconds.

This is survivable with no damage and no loss of consciousness by untrained individuals if they are facing the direction of travel (or, as wikipedia puts it, "eyeballs-in"). The limit for eyeballs-in with no damage or LOC experimentally is about 17g. Eyeball-out is only 12g.

If the force is parallel to the spine, rather than perpendicular, the numbers are much lower. Around 9g for a trained person in a g suit.

So, as long as this was done in a controlled fashion, so as to keep the people aligned properly, it would be survivable and not too harmful, at least for healthy people. Probably not too pleasant.

However, your 100 miles is way to low. It's 100 miles if they are traveling straight down, but they would not be. They are starting with a velocity of 14000 mph perpendicular to straight down. The goal is to end up 100 miles lower with a velocity of 1000 mph or less, so you can enter the atmosphere. You'd do this over much longer than 48 seconds, and travel much farther than 100 miles while doing it. Depending on how much fuel you've got, you could make it arbitrarily gentle.

Re:cool

[abigor]

1. Mt. Everest is 29,028 feet.

2. People climb it without supplementary oxygen all the time - it's considered the "real" way to climb Everest. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler first did it way back in 1980 or so.

What can cause issues is the lower pressure, which may lead to edemas. That's why you need to hang around at higher altitudes for a while first to acclimatise.

Two Separate Problems

[Bruce Perens]

There is the problem of descending from 120,000 feet with a parachute, which is solvable with space suits, multi-stage parachutes, etc.

Then there is the problem that this project would not address at all, which is how to decelerate from orbital speed of Mach 12 or so. The space shuttle that broke up on re-entry did so while it was going fast enough that the atmospheric friction would melt metal.

Re:Two Separate Problems

[Bruce Perens]

Kittinger used a multiple-stage parachute. He did most of the descent in 4 and a half minutes, with a drogue which kept him from tumbling. At 17K he opened his main chute and took 13 more minutes to descend.

Re:Two Separate Problems

[jd]

Yes, I remember watching. I'd only recently got the Space Shuttle handbook NASA had published and was comparing the sequence of steps the book gave versus the actual launch. MaxQ was with engines at 102%, whereas the handbook stated this should be 100%. Up until they identified the actual cause, I remember wondering if the extra stress had caused something to break.

Not long after, when they'd recovered the front section, I recall reading that they had found that the environmental controls had been altered after the break-up and before colliding with the ocean (hence the conclusion by NASA that the explosion had been survived by at least one of the crew). I do not know if they ever determined when those adjustments were made, or whether they were able to confirm they'd been made consciously versus being struck by an unconscious/dead crew member.

The theory that someone could have potentially bailed out rests on the premise that NASA's assessment at the time had indeed been correct and that the adjustment was made subsequent to the section the crew were in reaching apogee and that this section of the shuttle remained both high enough and at a low enough velocity for this new technique to have been useful. That is a LOT of assumptions and only one of them has to be incorrect for the whole idea to fall over for that specific case.

Regardless, you are absolutely correct in saying that this is a great piece of equipment to have. That and the experience/information obtained may very well have all kinds of influences, ranging from what we consider to be survivable through to what we consider to be hobbyist freefall. (To me, the ideal would be to pack the guy with motion and pressure sensors along with a device that can record the information at decent resolution for the entire descent provided it was not done to the point where it would increase the risk unduly. They probably will have some monitoring, or it wouldn't help NASA much, but the one thing you absolutely do not want is for the engineers to come back and say that too few parameters were being tracked for them to do anything with the results.)

Re:Two Separate Problems

[Bruce Perens]

Yes, the EVA suits and vehicle environments rebreathe, so it would be expected as a weight-saving measure if nothing else. You need 7 lbs of oxygen per hour in a rebreather. But there's more: the suit has to remove carbon dioxide to avoid a toxic atmosphere. So, you need the chemical load to leach 7 lbs of C02 out of air per hour. If you recycle your CO2 leach chemical, you need energy to heat and cool it. And then, you need temperature management.

When you're finished, it looks like a Mercury capsule :-)

Re:cool

[MichaelSmith]

1. Mt. Everest is 29,028 feet.

2. People climb it without supplementary oxygen all the time - it's considered the "real" way to climb Everest. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler first did it way back in 1980 or so.

Yes but you need to work up to it. You can die at 20000 feet (for example if pressurization fails in an aircraft) even though people live at that altitude in Nepal.