Hasta La Gadget!

I’m sure everyone is familiar with skydiving, but I’m not sure everyone is familiar with a wingsuit. If you have seen the movie Transformers 3, you might remember the soldiers in the flick jumping out of an airplane wearing black suits that allow them to glide rather than simply float to the ground. The atuntmen performing that stunt in the movie were actually from the Red Bull Air Force.

Some of those same daredevils recently took a trip to Malaysia where they jumped out of an airplane and used their wingsuits to fly around some of the most iconic landmarks in the country. The stuntmen flew their wingsuits so close to the KL Tower in Kuala Lumpur that look like they were going to hit it in the video. They also flew by the iconic Petronas Twin Towers.

That particular building has two identical towers standing side-by-side with a sky bridge connecting them. The building has been in several movies so you have likely seen it before. The two men who flew between the towers were traveling at about 120 mph. Check out the video to see the daredevils in action. This isn’t quite as cool as the Red Bull sponsored Felix Baumgartner 120,000+ foot skydive, but the wingsuits are pretty amazing nonetheless.

After numerous false starts due to weather and other technical challenges, daredevil Felix Baumgartner successfully launched on his expedition to 120,000 feet this morning. The capsule took off at approximately 9:30am Mountain Daylight Time, and is currently on its way up to its peak altitude of about 23 miles.

As of this writing, Baumgartner is at about 46,000 feet, and rising rapidly towards his goal. The capsule is heading up at about 900 feet-per-minute, and is expected to reach “float” – where he will level off in about 80 minutes or so – around 11:30am MDT. Once he reaches that level, Felix will carefully exit the capsule, and begin his rapid plunge back to Earth below, breaking the speed of sound on the way down before he opens his chute.

Watch the amazing HD live footage of the launch in progress below:

Or head over to the Red Bull Stratos website for live updates on the mission’s progress.

Good luck on the dive, Felix! We’re rooting for you!

Today is the big day for daredevil Felix Baumgartner and the Red Bull Stratos team. Assuming the weather holds out, Baumgartner will spend two hours climbing to over 120,000 feet inside his pressurized capsule attached to the world’s largest helium filled balloon. Once Baumgartner reaches his apex at about 23 miles above the Earth’s surface, he will jump.

The skydive isn’t the only record Baumgartner aims to break. Assuming he succeeds, he will also be making the highest manned balloon flight ever. Baumgartner and his team expect that at the altitude where his descent will begin, he will need to reach 690 mph to break the sound barrier. He will become the first human to travel faster than the speed of sound without an aircraft if all goes according to plan.

Luckily for us, Baumgartner will be wearing multiple cameras on his high-tech pressure suit. Baumgartner has five cameras in various locations on his body that will record footage so we can all watch as he plummets to the ground. Baumgartner’s suit also has a variety of sensors and other technology to allow him to communicate with his ground crew and to verify if he breaks the speed of sound.

You can watch the live broadcast below, or at redbullstratos.com/live.

And while we wait for the weather to clear, you can watch this cool CGI simulation of the dive:

As we already know, daredevil Felix Baumgartner plans to hop in a pressurized capsule and using a gigantic helium balloon, ascend to 23 miles above the surface of the Earth. On October 8th, Baumgartner hopes to set a world record for the highest altitude skydive ever performed. He even plans to break the sound barrier without using an aircraft on his way down.

Some details have surfaced about the gigantic helium-filled balloon that will be used to take Baumgartner and his pressurized capsule to over 120,000 feet above the surface of the Earth. The balloon has a volume of 30 million cubic feet and will be filled with helium. The process of putting in all that helium will take up to an hour. The balloon in the photograph above is a much smaller 128 foot-tall balloon used to carry Baumgartner to altitude of 13 miles above the Earth back in March.

The balloon to be used for his record-setting jump next week will be a staggering 334 feet-tall. The balloon is incredibly thin at only 0.0008-inch thick. That is 10 times thinner than the baggy you put your sandwich in. Even at that thickness, it still weighs 3708 pounds, and can hold up to 834,497 cubic meters of helium. To put that in perspective, that’s about 280 times more helium than your average hot air balloon.

You can keep an eye on Felix’s mission over at the Red Bull Stratos website.

[via Wired]