The Big Jump

February 19, 2014 • 10:14 am

This video of Felix’s Baumgartner’s famous 24-mile jump to Earth was posted on January 31 of this year and has already garnered over twelve million views. The new aspect of this video is that it’s filmed largely by GoPro cameras affixed to the jumper.

Reader Jon, who sent me the link to the video, adds this:

It’s been about a year and a half since Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon at the edge of space, but GoPro just recently released a video inviting everyone along for the ride. Baumgartner was wearing five GoPro HD HERO2 cameras to record his decent. Several other cameras were mounted to his capsule. The video starts with some historical footage of Joe Kittinger’s historic jump in 1960 from 19 ∏ miles. Kittinger served as capsule coordinator directing Baumgartner on his jump.

11 thoughts on “The Big Jump”

  1. Flying Felix is my personal hero. I would have done anything to be in his place!

    These GoPro cameras are superb!

      1. It’s a well-known and observable fact that time passes faster the older you get. Explain that Einstein!

        1. This seems to be an instance of Weber’s Law.

          We could count personal age and longevity logarithmically, but it doesn’t seem quite right. Certainly years would not be the appropriate thing to log-transform, days would be marginally better. Celebrating birthdays at day 10, 100, 1000 (you wouldn’t even remember these), then 10000 (27 years already!), then… oh, maybe the old annual cycle isn’t so fleeting after all.

  4. Most impressive. What was also interesting was to follow his heart-rate.

    The way he landed squarely on both feet without running or tumbling was also impressive.

  5. Why do I keep expecting Mission Control to say “Take your protein pill and put your helmet on”?

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