Fearless Felix’s Leap

There you are 18 miles above the earth. You’ve ridden to this altitude in a cozy hi-tech capsule suspended beneath an array of helium balloons. But now your time has come, you clamber through the hatch in your cumbersome astronaut like space suit. You stand on a small platform, below you the thin upper atmosphere of Earth.  You’re about to step off the platform and plunge toward the ground in free fall, possibly approaching the speed of sound. Why? Because you’re “Fearless Felix” Baumgartner.  He just completed a warm up jump from 18 miles up, his record attempt will be from an altitude of 23 miles, somewhere around 125,000 feet.  The attempt is planned within the next month.