Felix Baumgartner's world skydive record attempt under way

Austrian daredevil begins daring
ascent to 37km above Earth hoping to
make record-breaking free fall.
An Austrian daredevil has started his
daring ascent to 37km above Earth
hoping to make a death-defying free
fall that could make him the first
skydiver to break the sound barrier.
Cheers broke out as the craft took
flight at 9:30am local time (15:30 GMT)
on Sunday in US state of New Mexico.
The enormous balloon rose, then
pulled into the air a capsule
containing Felix Baumgartner, 43.
His mother wept as she watched the
launch, which had been scrapped
several times during the previous
week by high winds.
Baumgartner's ascent into the
stratosphere should take two and half
to three hours. The descent should
last just 15 to 20 minutes, more than
half of it beneath the relative safety of
his parachute's canopy.
The 30 million-cubic-foot (850,000-
cubic-metre) plastic balloon, is about
one-tenth the thickness of a Ziploc
bag, or roughly as thin as a dry
cleaner bag.
Baumgartner aims to break a 52-year-
old high altitude parachute jump
record held by project adviser Joe
Kittinger.
In 1960, Kittinger, now a retired US Air
Force colonel, jumped from a balloon
flying at 31,333 metres and fell for
four minutes and 36 seconds before
opening his parachute.
Shock waves risk
Baumgartner hopes to top that with a
jump from 120,000 feet and free fall
for five minutes and 35 seconds.
There is so little air in the upper
reaches of the atmosphere that after
about 30 seconds of free fall,
Baumgartner should be moving faster
than the speed of sound, which is
roughly 1,110 kph at that altitude.
Among the risks Baumgartner faces is
the chance that his supersonic body
will trigger shock waves that could
collide with the force of an explosion.
But Baumgartner's medical team
doesn't believe this situation is very
likely because the air in the
stratosphere would be too thin to
carry the waves.
No human has broken the sound
barrier during freefall, at least not
intentionally.
On January 25, 1966, Bill Weaver, a US
test pilot aboard an SR-71 Blackbird
aircraft, was ejected from his
damaged plane at Mach 3.18 - more
than three times faster than the speed
of sound - and survived.
Besides breaking several records,
including highest-altitude freefall,
longest free fall and highest manned
balloon flight, Baumgartner and his
team hope the jump will help
engineers working on spacesuits for
NASA and the budding commercial
space tourism industry.
Aljazeera