Sunday, June 03, 2007

Much More Fun

Sorry about the link on the last post, I can't get it to work. Never mind, you'll enjoy this a lot more. Stick it on full screen and watch Joe Kittinger's 1960 balloon jump from 102 000 feet.

Some of it is from the balloon camera, some of it is from his helmet. All of it is pretty outrageous. You can see the curvature of the Earth as he tumbles around. He was timed by radar at over 600 mph.

It was part of a series of jumps at the time of the Mercury project to see if the astronauts would have a chance of surviving a bailout if something went wrong just after takeoff.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can't watch that. It makes me feel sick with terror just looking at it.