red bull stratos

Austria seems like a nice place to visit - I have never been there. However, I am not going to Salzburg (even though I said I was). The original plan was for WOMWorld/Noika to fly me to visit Felix and the Red Bull Stratos team. It was an exciting plan. Now there is a new plan. The new plan is for me to instead go to the ACTUAL Red Bull Stratos Jump. I know it is not Salzburg, but in my mind this is a huge upgrade. Ok, I can't help it. This is the first thing that came to my mind. Me: But I thought I was going to Austria. We had a deal. WOMWorld/Nokia: I am altering the deal. Pray I…

I am still thinking about the Red Bull Stratos Jump. Sorry, but there is just tons of great physics here. Next question - how big of a balloon would you need to get up to 120,000 feet? I am not going into the buoyancy details of Archimedes Principle - I think that was covered fairly thoroughly with the MythBusters floating lead balloon. However, in short, here is a force diagram for a floating balloon. For a floating balloon, the buoyancy force must equal the weight of the whole thing. It turns out that the buoyant force is equal to the weight of the gas (or fluid) the object displaces…

A new video from the Red Bull Stratos Jump guys came out. Here it is: This reminds me of an unanswered question about the Stratos jump that I didn't address on my last post on this topic. Commenter Long Drop asked about how much Felix would heat up as he falls from 120,000 feet. This is a great question. The first, off the bat answer is that he won't heat up too much. Why do I say this? Well, when Joe Kittinger jumped from over 100,000 feet and didn't melt. Still, this is a great thing to calculate. How do you calculate something like this? I will look at this in terms of energy. For…

Red Bull is sponsoring this sky dive from really really really high up - Stratos: Mission to the Edge of Space. Seems dangerous. The basic idea is that Felix Baumgartner will take a balloon ride up to 120,000 feet and jump out. Here are some questions: Will he reach supersonic speeds? The Red Bull site says: "can Felix react to a 35 second acceleration to mach 1?" How about the claim that he will free fall for 5 minutes and 35 seconds? That seems pretty short. In 1960, Joe Kittinger jumped from 102,800 feet. Will 20,000 feet make a large difference? Assumptions Clearly, this can be a…