Red Bull Stratos Near Space Jump

[A.Member]

This was simply awesome and should be an AE point of discussion at the every squadron.   This is the type of thing that gets people motivated and the opportunities for such records are becoming increasingly rare.

Has anyone seen any follow up interviews?  I'd like to get his thoughts on the spin and what he did to recover.  I heard that he thought he was going to black out and even the live footage cut away for a bit (assuming he was in trouble). 

What an amazing first step.   Holy cow. 

[SARDOC]

This was simply awesome and should be an AE point of discussion at the every squadron.   This is the type of thing that gets people motivated and the opportunities for such records are becoming increasingly rare.

Has anyone seen any follow up interviews?  I'd like to get his thoughts on the spin and what he did to recover.  I heard that he thought he was going to black out and even the live footage cut away for a bit (assuming he was in trouble). 

What an amazing first step.   Holy cow.

I saw one interview where he stated that it took over thirty seconds to recover from the spin, the blood was rushing to his head, and he almost felt the need to deploy the drogue chute...but he knew doing that he would lose the ability to break the sound barrier.

[A.Member]

...but he knew doing that he would lose the ability to break the sound barrier.

That brings up an interesting point.  I don't recall the timing exactly but I wonder if he regained control before or after breaking the sound barrier.  There are some interesting aerodynamics involved in breaking the sound barrier and I wonder if that played a factor in his recovery?  Or maybe it was all luck!

[a2capt]

"In response to Red Bull Stratos, Slim Jim has sponsored the shortest freefall of all time."

[JeffDG]

"In response to Red Bull Stratos, Slim Jim has sponsored the shortest freefall of all time."

I hate when people do stuff like this and don't bother with basic physics....0.006 seconds involves a free-fall of just over 1/100th of an inch.

[a2capt]

but .. but .. then the whole gimmick wouldn't work on animation

[JeffDG]

but .. but .. then the whole gimmick wouldn't work on animation

Just make it 0.1s...that's about 4" of free-fall.

[NIN]

I had an opportunity this weekend to do a little impromptu Aerospace Education related to Red Bull Stratos, high altitude ballooning and parachutes.

A gentleman, his son and his son's classmate were at my DZ to learn more about parachutes.  The entire fifth grade class at the kid's school down on the Cape are conducting a high altitude balloon science project.  The 120 5th graders are divided up into functional teams: payload, imaging, balloon, parachute, recovery, tracking, telemetry, public affairs, launch, internet, etc.

My DZO knows my background, so she had me give them a quick tour.  I've done this for CAP and scout groups in the past.

I immediately led them over to the parachute loft where we got up-close and personal with some round parachutes, albeit much larger than they were going to be using. The young lady was on the "parachute" team and was doing research for her team on this trip.  The son was on the telemetry team, and mostly along for the ride. 

These two kids were very well versed in the specifics of Red Bull Stratos, and were able to talk  about the layers of the atmosphere, the temperature and pressure demands of the flight, etc.  The young man got all excited when I started quizzing him about their instrumentation and tracking approach and told him I was a ham radio operator and knew a thing or two about APRS and direction finding (*they're going to use a SPOT tracker as the backup tracking system*).  He was really stoked when he spotted a Altitrack much like Felix's (albeit, with 18,000 ft as the top end, unlike Felix's 120,000 foot one)

I was a little stunned to be talking about deployment characteristics, nomenclature, and construction techniques with a 5th grader, and have this young lady not only soak it all in, but throw me some very, very interesting curveball questions.  At one point, we were discussing suspension lines and the characteristics of the different types of line (they're using 550 cord purchased from a surplus store) and she started to ask me about the flexibility and brittleness of different suspension line material (HMA & spectra) at low temperatures. I had to feign ignorance as to the specific characteristics in that environment, since all of my experience with these materials only goes to 20,000 ft or so, but I was able to give her some info on where to start looking for info.

It was neat to see 5th graders be so well-versed in the subject matter at hand.  I did not hurt that the gent was a former Naval Aviator F-14 jock and now drives 737s for Southwest, so he wasn't exactly "aviation clueless."