In a giant leap from more than 24 miles up, a daredevil skydiver shattered the sound barrier while making the highest jump ever — a tumbling, death-defying plunge from a balloon to a safe landing in the New Mexico desert.
Felix Baumgartner hit Mach 1.24, or 1,342 kph, on Sunday, according to preliminary data, and became the first man to reach supersonic speed without travelling in a jet or a spacecraft after hopping out of a capsule that had reached an altitude of 128,100 feet above the Earth.
Landing on his feet in the desert, the man known as “Fearless Felix” lifted his arms in victory to the cheers of jubilant friends and spectators who closely followed his descent in a live television feed at the command centre.
“When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about breaking records anymore, you do not think about gaining scientific data,” he said after the jump. “The only thing you want is to come back alive.”
A worldwide audience watched live on the Internet via cameras mounted on his capsule as Mr. Baumgartner, wearing a pressurised suit, stood in the doorway of his capsule, gave a thumbs-up and leapt into the stratosphere.
“Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,” an exuberant Baumgartner told journalists outside mission control after the jump.
Mr. Baumgartner’s descent lasted just over nine minutes, about half of it in a free fall of 119,846 feet, according to Brian Utley, a jump observer from the FAI, an international group that works to determine and maintain the integrity of aviation records. He said the speed calculations were preliminary figures.
During the first part of Mr. Baumgartner’s free fall, anxious onlookers at the command centre held their breath as he appeared to spin uncontrollably.
“When I was spinning the first 10, 20 seconds, I never thought I was going to lose my life but I was disappointed because I’m going to lose my record. I put seven years of my life into this,” he said.
Mr. Baumgartner said travelling faster than sound was “hard to describe because you don’t feel it.” The pressurised suit prevented him from feeling the rushing air or even the loud noise he made when breaking the sound barrier.
With no reference points, “you don’t know how fast you travel,” he said.
The 43-year-old former Austrian paratrooper with more than 2,500 jumps behind him had taken off early on Sunday in a capsule carried by an ultra-thin helium balloon.
Any contact with the capsule on his exit could have torn his suit, a rip that could expose him to a lack of oxygen and temperatures as low as minus 56.67 Celsius. That could have caused lethal bubbles to form in his bodily fluids.
But none of that happened. He activated his parachute as he neared Earth, gently gliding into the desert about 64.37 km east of Roswell and landing smoothly. The images triggered another loud cheer from onlookers at mission control, among them his mother, Eva Baumgartner, who was overcome with emotion, crying.
Mr. Baumgartner’s team included Joe Kittinger, who first tried to break the sound barrier from 31.38 km up in 1960, reaching speeds of 988 kph. With Mr. Kittinger inside mission control, the two men could be heard going over technical details during the ascension.
“Our guardian angel will take care of you,” Mr. Kittinger radioed to Mr. Baumgartner around the 100,000-foot mark.
As Mr. Baumgartner ascended, so did the number of viewers watching on YouTube; company officials said the event broke a site record with more than 8 million simultaneous live streams at its peak.
After Mr. Baumgartner landed, his sponsor, Red Bull, posted a picture of him on his knees on the ground to Facebook, generating nearly 216,000 likes, 10,000 comments and more than 29,000 shares in less than 40 minutes.
On Twitter, half the worldwide trending topics had something to do with the jump.
Mr. Baumgartner has said he plans to settle down with his girlfriend and fly helicopters on mountain rescue and firefighting missions in the U.S. and Austria.
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