One Big Step
OK, this is one of those WOW! kind of things. Austrian Felix Baumgartner used a ballon to climb to over 128,000 feet, stepped out of a capsule, and jumped. Because he was in the very thin air of the stratosphere, during his 4 minute free fall, he reached a speed of 834.4 miles per hour (that’s Mach 1.24)…faster than the speed of sound. This on the same day 65 years later when Chuck Yeagar became the first human to go faster than the speed of sound. Yeager used a rocket plane. Baumgartner was able to do it this year using just a space suit.
What a feeling it must have been to step out on the little step of that capsule and look down at the earth.
