sky dive

Crazy, but I was on CNN Saturday night. They contacted me at the last minute to talk about the Red Bull Stratos Jump. Here is a screen shot to show that I am not making this up (or that I have awesome photoshop skillz). Looking back, maybe I looked like an idiot. Really though, it wasn't my fault. I thought we were going to talk about physics. The first two questions threw me for a loop. Here are the two questions and my response (roughly paraphrased): Will Felix survive the jump? Answer: I guess so. Is there a scientific reason for this jump? Answer: I thought we were going to talk…

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…