The Man Who Pierced the Sky
When Felix Baumgartner set out to make a living by stunt jumping—from cliffs, buildings, and bridges—the young Austrian had no idea where it would take him: to a pressurized capsule nearly 24 miles above New Mexico, last October 14, preparing to free-fall farther than any man in history, and at supersonic speed. Detailing Baumgartner’s quest, William Langewiesche explores what drove him to ever greater heights.
I. The Climb
On the morning of Sunday, October 14, last year, the Austrian parachutist Felix Baumgartner sat in a pressurized capsule at nearly 128,000 feet, floating over the wastelands of eastern New Mexico, preparing to jump out. A fragile helium balloon suspended him there in ultra-thin air, higher than jets can fly. For more than three hours he had been breathing pure oxygen to purge his blood of nitrogen against decompression sickness, or “the bends.” Like astronauts or the pilots of high-altitude reconnaissance airplanes, he wore a full pressure suit with the helmet visor down. For now the suit was deflated, allowing for relatively easy movement, but Baumgartner disliked it nonetheless. The suit stank of rubber, and when inflated it hemmed him in. Baumgartner had never liked to be hemmed in. On his forearm he had a tattoo in Gothic lettering that proclaimed, born to fly.
His goal now was to break the altitude record for a human free fall, and in the process also to exceed the speed of sound. Otherwise known as Mach 1, that speed varies with temperature but is upwards of 660 miles per hour. Baumgartner was not there to advance mankind. That was for others to claim, if they liked. His own purpose was promotional. He was a showman for the Red Bull company, which had plowed a fortune into this endeavor in order to associate its energy drink with his feats. Baumgartner, who was 43 at the time, is certainly a manly man. He is photogenic. He is fit. His fiancée was Miss Lower Austria in 2006. When he furrows his brow he looks determined and intense. On-camera he becomes the very image of a middle-aged action figure, the perfect emblem for an important market segment of middle-aged men. When I drink Red Bull, I go supersonic. I am fearless. I am an Übermensch.
Red Bull is an Austrian company, and a big deal in that town. It sells a form of intoxication like ultra-sobriety. In doing so it seems to have answered the old question about trees falling in forests when no one is around. The conclusion during energy-drink events, at least, is that nothing happens unless it happens on video—and that YouTube especially is the key. As a result Baumgartner’s capsule was hung with 15 cameras, and he himself was hung with 5. Many of these cameras had extremely wide-angle lenses that exaggerated the curvature of the horizon, and showed the earth as a distant round ball, as if Baumgartner was in space. He was not. Indeed the horizon line there was to the naked eye very nearly flat, and at 128,000 feet Baumgartner was fully 200,000 feet lower than the generally agreed upon threshold to space. He was, however, at an extremely high altitude—99,000 feet higher than Mount Everest, and higher than anyone had ever flown except in spaceships and rocket planes. Beneath him, North America stretched for hundreds of miles in shades of brown and swirls of cloud; above him, the sky had turned a deep blue black. Outside the protective walls of his capsule, the atmospheric pressure was so low—a fraction of 1 percent of the pressure at sea level—that the briefest direct exposure to it would have been fatal. And yet he was going to inflate the pressure suit, fully depressurize the capsule, allow the door to roll open, step outside into the bright light of altitude, and hop into the void. Seconds later, if all went well, he was going to break the speed of sound.
For five years a group of veteran aerospace engineers and test pilots had coalesced around this project. One of those people was the American fighter pilot and research balloonist Joseph Kittinger, whose 1960 free-fall record (Mach 0.91 from 102,800 feet) Baumgartner was proposing to break. Now 84, Kittinger was rotund, a bit deaf, slightly crippled, married to an adoring younger woman, and every bit the man he ever was. He was currently controlling the balloon from the ground and serving as the main communicator on the radio link to Baumgartner in flight.
Forty-three miles to the west, at the Roswell, New Mexico, airport, in a pre-fabricated building that housed the project’s Mission Control, some of the principal engineers were worried about Baumgartner’s state of mind. However much they liked him personally and enjoyed his company over beers, they had found him to be difficult to work with—stubborn, self-dramatizing, smart yet intellectually insecure, strangely disengaged from the science behind the project, and emotionally unpredictable. He was certainly not the cool, well-educated test-pilot type they normally dealt with. He once abandoned the project in the midst of a tight schedule, went to the airport in tears, and flew home to Austria. One would expect Joseph Kittinger in particular to have disdained him for this: Kittinger the high-altitude pioneer; the three-tour combat pilot in Vietnam, who ejected in excess of Mach 1 when his F-4 was hit by an enemy missile; the prisoner of war who was tortured by his captors and still hates Jane Fonda; the adventurer who, after his air-force career, became the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in a balloon. Kittinger is not the type to abandon anything in a state of emotional distress. But as it turned out, it was Kittinger, more than any other team member, who could accommodate Baumgartner as a man.
The launch was flawless. The balloon drifted eastward, climbing a thousand feet a minute. At his station on the ground Kittinger had flight instrumentation and controls that allowed him to vent helium if the balloon climbed too fast, to drop ballast if it did not climb fast enough, and, at the extreme, to cut away the capsule and bring it down safely on its large, cargo-style parachute. Baumgartner had the same capabilities from inside the capsule and was trained to complete the flight autonomously should contact with Kittinger be lost, but meanwhile, quite reasonably, he had opted to leave the flying to the master. Within the constraints of his profession Baumgartner’s guiding principle has always been to minimize physical risk. He had covered the clear acrylic door in front of him with a sun shield taped with checklists, so his view outside was limited at best. Above his face was a bank of lights controlled by a camera crew on the ground to illuminate the interior, which otherwise would have been lit only by two small portholes on the sides. Radio communications and video images were streamed to the public after a 20-second delay, to allow for sanitizing if necessary. In the event of some grave embarrassment, or of a full-fledged catastrophe, the world would not hear and see it in real time, or perhaps ever.
Then, suddenly, after about an hour, as the balloon climbed through 68,000 feet, Baumgartner radioed, “Joe, I’ve got a problem with my faceplate.” Kittinger responded with a coded message to his team to cut the public audio feed. The crisis proceeded in private. Faceplate is another name for a helmet visor. Baumgartner’s was electrically heated to keep it from fogging up—a condition of limited visibility that would preclude any high-altitude jump. Because he now noticed some fogging when he exhaled, Baumgartner believed that the heating system had failed.
The project chief—a tall, gaunt Californian named Arthur Thompson—did some troubleshooting and concluded that the system was working fine. He reminded Baumgartner that, in any case, the visor would switch automatically to a hardwired single setting of “High” when he unplugged the umbilical cord that connected the suit to the capsule’s power, and began to rely solely on the batteries in his chest pack. The batteries would deliver 20 minutes of undiminished visor heating—plenty of time for Baumgartner to leave the capsule and fall to an altitude of 10,000 feet, where he was expected to deploy his parachute and open the visor in preparation for landing. The logic was solid, but Baumgartner would have none of it. He continued to express concerns about the visor. At Mission Control, the engineers began to express concerns about Baumgartner. Was he collapsing on them again, and, as had been his pattern in the past, picking on some system to blame? Aerospace engineers are not prone to profanity, but one later admitted to me that he thought, “What the heck is going on?”
I. The Climb
On the morning of Sunday, October 14, last year, the Austrian parachutist Felix Baumgartner sat in a pressurized capsule at nearly 128,000 feet, floating over the wastelands of eastern New Mexico, preparing to jump out. A fragile helium balloon suspended him there in ultra-thin air, higher than jets can fly. For more than three hours he had been breathing pure oxygen to purge his blood of nitrogen against decompression sickness, or “the bends.” Like astronauts or the pilots of high-altitude reconnaissance airplanes, he wore a full pressure suit with the helmet visor down. For now the suit was deflated, allowing for relatively easy movement, but Baumgartner disliked it nonetheless. The suit stank of rubber, and when inflated it hemmed him in. Baumgartner had never liked to be hemmed in. On his forearm he had a tattoo in Gothic lettering that proclaimed, born to fly.
His goal now was to break the altitude record for a human free fall, and in the process also to exceed the speed of sound. Otherwise known as Mach 1, that speed varies with temperature but is upwards of 660 miles per hour. Baumgartner was not there to advance mankind. That was for others to claim, if they liked. His own purpose was promotional. He was a showman for the Red Bull company, which had plowed a fortune into this endeavor in order to associate its energy drink with his feats. Baumgartner, who was 43 at the time, is certainly a manly man. He is photogenic. He is fit. His fiancée was Miss Lower Austria in 2006. When he furrows his brow he looks determined and intense. On-camera he becomes the very image of a middle-aged action figure, the perfect emblem for an important market segment of middle-aged men. When I drink Red Bull, I go supersonic. I am fearless. I am an Übermensch.
Red Bull is an Austrian company, and a big deal in that town. It sells a form of intoxication like ultra-sobriety. In doing so it seems to have answered the old question about trees falling in forests when no one is around. The conclusion during energy-drink events, at least, is that nothing happens unless it happens on video—and that YouTube especially is the key. As a result Baumgartner’s capsule was hung with 15 cameras, and he himself was hung with 5. Many of these cameras had extremely wide-angle lenses that exaggerated the curvature of the horizon, and showed the earth as a distant round ball, as if Baumgartner was in space. He was not. Indeed the horizon line there was to the naked eye very nearly flat, and at 128,000 feet Baumgartner was fully 200,000 feet lower than the generally agreed upon threshold to space. He was, however, at an extremely high altitude—99,000 feet higher than Mount Everest, and higher than anyone had ever flown except in spaceships and rocket planes. Beneath him, North America stretched for hundreds of miles in shades of brown and swirls of cloud; above him, the sky had turned a deep blue black. Outside the protective walls of his capsule, the atmospheric pressure was so low—a fraction of 1 percent of the pressure at sea level—that the briefest direct exposure to it would have been fatal. And yet he was going to inflate the pressure suit, fully depressurize the capsule, allow the door to roll open, step outside into the bright light of altitude, and hop into the void. Seconds later, if all went well, he was going to break the speed of sound.
For five years a group of veteran aerospace engineers and test pilots had coalesced around this project. One of those people was the American fighter pilot and research balloonist Joseph Kittinger, whose 1960 free-fall record (Mach 0.91 from 102,800 feet) Baumgartner was proposing to break. Now 84, Kittinger was rotund, a bit deaf, slightly crippled, married to an adoring younger woman, and every bit the man he ever was. He was currently controlling the balloon from the ground and serving as the main communicator on the radio link to Baumgartner in flight.
Forty-three miles to the west, at the Roswell, New Mexico, airport, in a pre-fabricated building that housed the project’s Mission Control, some of the principal engineers were worried about Baumgartner’s state of mind. However much they liked him personally and enjoyed his company over beers, they had found him to be difficult to work with—stubborn, self-dramatizing, smart yet intellectually insecure, strangely disengaged from the science behind the project, and emotionally unpredictable. He was certainly not the cool, well-educated test-pilot type they normally dealt with. He once abandoned the project in the midst of a tight schedule, went to the airport in tears, and flew home to Austria. One would expect Joseph Kittinger in particular to have disdained him for this: Kittinger the high-altitude pioneer; the three-tour combat pilot in Vietnam, who ejected in excess of Mach 1 when his F-4 was hit by an enemy missile; the prisoner of war who was tortured by his captors and still hates Jane Fonda; the adventurer who, after his air-force career, became the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in a balloon. Kittinger is not the type to abandon anything in a state of emotional distress. But as it turned out, it was Kittinger, more than any other team member, who could accommodate Baumgartner as a man.
The launch was flawless. The balloon drifted eastward, climbing a thousand feet a minute. At his station on the ground Kittinger had flight instrumentation and controls that allowed him to vent helium if the balloon climbed too fast, to drop ballast if it did not climb fast enough, and, at the extreme, to cut away the capsule and bring it down safely on its large, cargo-style parachute. Baumgartner had the same capabilities from inside the capsule and was trained to complete the flight autonomously should contact with Kittinger be lost, but meanwhile, quite reasonably, he had opted to leave the flying to the master. Within the constraints of his profession Baumgartner’s guiding principle has always been to minimize physical risk. He had covered the clear acrylic door in front of him with a sun shield taped with checklists, so his view outside was limited at best. Above his face was a bank of lights controlled by a camera crew on the ground to illuminate the interior, which otherwise would have been lit only by two small portholes on the sides. Radio communications and video images were streamed to the public after a 20-second delay, to allow for sanitizing if necessary. In the event of some grave embarrassment, or of a full-fledged catastrophe, the world would not hear and see it in real time, or perhaps ever.
Then, suddenly, after about an hour, as the balloon climbed through 68,000 feet, Baumgartner radioed, “Joe, I’ve got a problem with my faceplate.” Kittinger responded with a coded message to his team to cut the public audio feed. The crisis proceeded in private. Faceplate is another name for a helmet visor. Baumgartner’s was electrically heated to keep it from fogging up—a condition of limited visibility that would preclude any high-altitude jump. Because he now noticed some fogging when he exhaled, Baumgartner believed that the heating system had failed.
The project chief—a tall, gaunt Californian named Arthur Thompson—did some troubleshooting and concluded that the system was working fine. He reminded Baumgartner that, in any case, the visor would switch automatically to a hardwired single setting of “High” when he unplugged the umbilical cord that connected the suit to the capsule’s power, and began to rely solely on the batteries in his chest pack. The batteries would deliver 20 minutes of undiminished visor heating—plenty of time for Baumgartner to leave the capsule and fall to an altitude of 10,000 feet, where he was expected to deploy his parachute and open the visor in preparation for landing. The logic was solid, but Baumgartner would have none of it. He continued to express concerns about the visor. At Mission Control, the engineers began to express concerns about Baumgartner. Was he collapsing on them again, and, as had been his pattern in the past, picking on some system to blame? Aerospace engineers are not prone to profanity, but one later admitted to me that he thought, “What the heck is going on?”
