The Red Bull Stratos team has kept itself under wraps until today’s press conference at the New York Academy of Sciences in NYC. The ambitious project marks the first major attempt at breaking an old but daunting skydiving record, one that starts at the edge of space.In 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of a capsule at 102,800 feet above the Earth’s surface and, in just minutes returned to the surface by simply falling. The falling part was easy. The surviving part was not—his first jump, from the Excelsior I module nearly ended in disaster when a parachute cord wrapped around his neck. His main chute, attached to a timer, deployed and saved him.
In Excelsior III, he failed to report a malfunctioning glove and nearly lost his hand to depressurization. But his record-breaking jump was successful, and having fulfilled its mission, the Air Force stopped jumping from record heights. His would-be successor is cut from the same mold, but has traveled a far different road.
Felix Baumgartner wears two tattoos—one, on his arm that says “Born to Fly” and another on his back, 502, that marks his BASE-jumping code—and has built a career out of from skydiving with frightening regularity and launching himself from architectural landmarks like the Gold Gate Bridge and Taipei 101 with a parachute on his back.
He is a daredevil, but according to Kittinger and the rest of the Red Bull Stratos team, he is a calculating one that has survived thousands of skydives by knowing how to prepare and when to back away from a jump.
So then, is this jump a stunt? In a way, it is. This is sponsored by Red Bull, after all, which has associated itself with extreme, entertaining, and daring sporting endeavors for the last decade or so, from the Dakar Rally to snowboard racing.
