"The Man Who Fell to Earth" --Felix Baumgartner's Supersonic Skydive

 

                    

Want to watch a human break the sound barrier? Austrian daredevil, Felix Baumgartner, whose Sunday freefall was watched around the world, was at one point traveling at 833 mph or Mach 1.24, shattering the speed of sound during his 4 minute 20 second freefall. He is the only human to do so without the aid of a supersonic jet or space shuttle.

"It's like swimming without touching the water, and it's hard because every time it turns you around you have to figure out what to do. So I was sticking my arm out then it became worse," he said. "I had a lot of pressure in my head. But I didn't feel like I was passing out. I was still feeling ok, I -- I thought, 'I can handle the situation.' And I did."

The last word Felix Baumgartner said before he launched himself from a capsule floating at around 39 kilometres above the surface of the Earth just after 12pm local time in Roswell, New Mexico was "I'm coming home now."

Don't miss Australian Baumgartner free falling over 127,000 feet. You can stream it on YouTube. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIxH6DToXQ

 

         

 

Comments

[dr burke]

The only explanation for his survival through the sound barrier, is his coefficient of stiffness must have been fractionalized. A subset of his stiffness. One would assume.

"In general, the speed of sound c is given by the Newton-Laplace equation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound

Where E is a coefficient of stiffness, the bulk modulus (or the modulus of bulk elasticity for gases),is the density

Thus the speed of sound increases with the stiffness (the resistance of an elastic body to deformation by an applied force) of the material, and decreases with the density. For ideal gases the bulk modulus P is simply the gas pressure multiplied by the adiabatic index.