The base of the ride, however, sits at the 920-foot level and blasts up 160 feet from there. It is a fairly standard 160-foot-tall version of the ride (some drop towers rise much higher). You never really feel a free fall as the cable grabs you as you step off and you feel like you are just hanging from a cable. But Big Shot is located at the very apex of the Stratosphere. Instead, he responded to ground controllers watching him from a camera rigged above his suit by slightly moving one leg to acknowledge their communications. This is a hydraulic freefall drop tower, similar to many found at theme parks. Eustace kept his motions to a minimum during his ascent, including avoiding moving his arm to toggle a radio microphone. His suit did not have a cooling system, so it was necessary to make elaborate design modifications to keep dry air in his helmet so that his face plate did not fog. Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner celebrated his unprecedented feat Monday after becoming the first man to break the sound barrier in a record-shattering, death-defying freefall jump from the edge of space. Eustace sufficiently cool at the top of the stratosphere, because there is no atmosphere to remove the heat. The stratosphere becomes warmer at higher elevations, and the suit designers had to figure out how to keep Mr. Left movements must be made for rightward motion, for instance, and upward movements for downward motion. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 69.5K subscribers In 2014, engineer and stratospheric explorer Alan Eustace ascended via balloon to the stratosphere and then took a freefall plunge of. Many of the redesigns were the result of technical surprises.įor example, he discovered that in order to control his suit, he was required to make movements that were exactly the opposite of the control motions made by a conventional parachutist. Eustace said that his technical team designed and redesigned many of the components of his parachute and life-support system during the three-year development phase. A veteran aircraft pilot and parachutist, he worked as a computer hardware designer at Digital Equipment Corporation for 15 years before moving to Google in 2002. His family crowded into a station wagon to watch every launch from Cape Canaveral (known as Cape Kennedy during some of that time). Eustace said he gained a love of space and spaceflight while growing up in Orlando, Fla., during the 1960s and 1970s.
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