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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."'"
This problem is a solution for parachuting from the ISS. If there was some problem and no one could get up there and they had massive system failures, how do they get down? If you had a shuttle launch where tiles were damaged and there wasn't a standby shuttle able to get them and the repairs couldn't be done in space, what do you do with the people? In short, if it works at 100,000 feet, it may work at higher altitudes. And if not, 100,000 feet has plenty in common with the ISS orbit such that it shouldn't be hard to extrapolate. Then, the emergency equipment is a parachute, the suit, and retrorockets. Quicker and cheaper than a rescue launch, and depending on the problem encountered, possibly safer.
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