So the guy straps himself to balloon, rides straight up for 2 hours, 25 miles high.
So 12.5 mph, a little faster than the average bicycle pace. Straight up.
Works with other engineers in secret for 3 years to knock out a badass space survival suit.
And then, just for us kids, "cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device . . ." and achieves 800mph+, setting off a "small sonic boom".
It's rare for crazy people to survive that long ;)
Actually, IMO it's much more reasonable to take up risky hobby's late in life. Only real issue is your reflexes are slower and your recovery times are longer, but I don't see either of those being an issue for this kind of stunt.
Mark Hunt will fight for the UFC Heavyweight championship on November 15. He's 40. It's not 57, but still interesting to see athletes push themselves into later ages than their competition.
In highly technical sports like MMA, the knowledge and muscle memory must be a pretty big advantage, but unlike this stunt, reflexes and recovery times are very much at issue. :-)
Anderson Silva (that according to Dana White is the best UFC fighter EVER) lost his title (UFC Middleweight champion) when he was 38 years old, and next year he plans in getting it back.
Or getting the next weight category title... (he said that on his age defending middleweight title was getting harder, as he was getting too old to do violent weight shifting, and was considering just fighting without weight shifting...)
31 year old Operations/DevOps at a startup. I still find time to build CNC mills from scratch, and my current/long-term project is building a 40' sailing vessel for a circumnavigation.
I have no college education. I can weld (quite well), I've built 3d models for laser sintering, I've assembled carbon fiber body panels. If you want to do something, learn how to do it. Then go do it!
Unfortunately, this only tends to work during periods of economic prosperity. When times get tough, those without credentials usually seem to be the first to be ousted.
But I've long wondered whether that's true. How'd you fare during 2008? It'd be nice to collect some datapoints from someone else.
The phenomenon seemed most true just after The Bubble. I think tptacek mentioned he had some pretty substantial credentials yet finding a job was extraordinarily difficult.
Faired okay in 2008. Company I was working for went out of business (was IT manager making $96K/yr), was hired 3 months later to do IT operations for datataking for a detector at the Large Hadron Collider ($86K/yr). Managed ~6K linux boxes, had a good time, learned what essentially became my DevOps career. Left after a year to go back into the private sector for a $40K/year salary increase managing datacenters.
I've only been asked 3-4 times about my college education (or lack thereof), and its never stopped me from getting a job. YMMV.
this can happen only in NA: people w/out school lead data centers. I know a Sociologist who was a Director of IT Strategy and Planning, a retail salesman and Preacher becoming Oracle Developer (I had to visit internal establishments of a big job agency just to see who is it that they are hiring for Oracle positions because I, who started doing Oracle with it's first commercial version, Oracle 5 Beta in 1988., and worked in and around Oracle ever since, was certainly not amongst those lucky souls. They even told me, just before the Internet Bust 2000-2002 that "they will not be recommending me for Oracle projects"!? I made sure that in the last 14 years, every 6mths or so I send an email to that person starting always with that quotation and always reminding him that I was the state Champion of Math and Physics at the age of 17 and never mentioning my University Electrical Engineering degree and M.Sc. Computer Science including 25 years of experience in IT - btw, in order to feed my family, back in the 90s, I had to go low level, deep down low where no shoe salesman can ever go, writing STREAMS drivers and Unix communication gateways - ALL other positions were taken by people not educated in IT, computer science and electrical engineering. 2000s improved a bit: they started hiring Chemical and Mechanical engineers in IT as well, but not computer science and electrical engineers. Nowadays still 80% of IT positions are taken by intruders in the field!), etc. etc. NA led world to this Slump of All Slumps from which it will never recover, read my lips
Reading what you wrote, I wonder if you've considered that there might be non-technical, more personal reasons you've had a hard time finding employment in your field. Holding a 14-year-long nastygram-writing grudge against a job agency doesn't seem like the best use of your clearly valuable time. I really mean no offense here; I've had to make some adjustments in my way of dealing with people over the years, as well.
there are too many stories. On 23rd of Dec 1999. I went for an interview with XXX, an Enron like looser company (btw, this is what happened in Enron, a distilled hitchhiker guide to enronization of NA: a company A sold assets to company B. Company A continued to use those assets). This was my second or third coming to their establishments (first time I visited them they were porting from Ingres to Oracle; on my second visit (different) they informed me they are porting from Oracle to - Ingres). So here I am on 23rd of Dec. 1999. I was greeted by a - think John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever - a "project manager" (btw "project manager", "business analyst" and similar stupidities are all The Tools of Corruption of Enormous Proportions. Project Management exists...in projects like NASA Space Shuttle etc. Or Hadron Colider and similar. But to create a "project" around 4 (four) lines of Perl code?? That is plain stupidity (I used Perl intentionally to express my disgust with all of that nonsense which cost NA economies trillions and trillions of dollars, together with so called "HR departments", "job agencies" and similar stupidities).
Back to our Travoilta PM. The guy had an Oracle book besides him (!it takes a disco dancer to at least come close to something that has any connection to Oracle whatsoever. All other idiots who declined my application for Oracle jobs, they opted for so called "behavioural" interviews (these are interviews where milk can be white or black, depending on the wish of the Travolta, pardon "interviewer"). Of course Travolta didn't understand a word I was saying. I was looking those huge establishments with 1000s of cubicles and at that moment I knew one thing with 100% certainty: this is going down sharply very soon. I knew something (but not enough, and not enough time to learn more) about short selling. I remember thinking: this Travolta company's stock is $125 and it must go to $60 no question about it. I had 300,000 at the time. Long story short: the stock went down not to $60, not even to $6, but TO F. 6 CENTS (!). From $125 to 6 cents. And I was a prime witness and I due to trading inexperience did nothing. I mean how many stock analysts could have such opportunity to observe a praised (top 3 companies in the field) company from inside and spot a huge technical signal: SELL, SELL, SELL.
> When times get tough, those without credentials usually seem to be the first to be ousted.
I have seen those without credentials having a harder time finding work, but I don't see why they would be the first to be ousted. Credentials are great for making the first cut in applying for a job, because they have to make that decision with relatively little time and effort. Credentials are also great for applying to companies that have little trust in their ability to interview candidates, but after you have been there for a while, they know what you can do. It doesn't make sense to get rid of people based on lack of credentials (and I've never seen it happen).
of course it does, read my post above. Even if an uneducated person is (uneducated) Edison himself as for every Edison there is an (educated) Tesla. No exceptions allowed
When it comes to hiring, a degree acts as a filter. Let's say 200 people apply for a post. (and when the economy is bad that number goes up). I know that of the 200 probably 20 would be perfect for the job.
Now I don't want to interview 200, because all I need to find is one of the 20. So first thing to do is filter the pile based on some objective measure. Having a degree is a quick way to get from 200 to 100 or less. And my experience has shown, that at least for some jobs, the bulk of the 20 will be in the 100 that are left.
Of course I'm talking about technical jobs here - if I was looking for a carpenter I'd use a different filter.
Are there people who would be perfect for the job excluded in the filtering process? Of course the are. But I'm going to reject 19 perfectly good candidates anyway so filtering a few out early is fine.
Of course the filter is not the only filter, and is not absolute. Experience trumps education so good specific experience can get you through to. And (for me) personal passion for the work trumps them all. That's hard to put in a resume, but is great whe I find it.
Incidentally of the 200 resumes the goal is to interview as few as possible. Ideally < 10. Like I say, I don't need 20 great people, just 1.
In a completely random spread is should be able to discard 90% of the applications without even looking at them. That's you dart-board approach.
In order to improve the odds though one can apply some reasonable filter. Any filter that does a better job of improving the dart board odds is, by definition, better than a dart board.
Now different jobs benefit from different filters. If I'm applying to do a job that takes a high-functioning brain, then it makes sense to apply a filter that already clasifying people based on mental ability.
It's important to understand that the goal is not to find the best 20 people. The goal is not to even find the best person. (because after some level the notion of "best" is highly subjective.) the goal of a recruiter is to find someone who is capable, and is good at the job.
The goal of you, the person trying to get hired, is to get past the filters. You may think you're the "best" person for the job ( but how would you know without yourself interviewing the other 199?)
Some filters, like a college degree, are hard to overcome. Because I can completely ignore you and still succeed in my task of hiring someone. To be honest what -you- think of my filter(s) is irrelevant. I'm not out to find every quality candidate - just fining 1 is sufficient.
If you find you are being negatively affected by hiring filters then you need to be creative about overcoming that.
You wouldn't filter out people who have no experience or knowledge of the job field? So if you have a grocery store bagger with no other job experience or schooling applying for a highly technical position that also requires managing 20 people and budgeting several million dollars, you would interview them?
this sounds like a very good reasoning. with your permission I'll pass it on to different other forums/blogs, like a prime example of Hiring Common Sense reasoning, Effectiveness in Hiring , something that was (with purpose?) dismantled in the years that preceded 2000-2002 Internet Bust and following Decade Long (And Counting) Bust
Statements like this are really easy to make when you have money to support your family. I've often said "I don't want to work for someone who does [x]" then taken a job for someone doing [x] and a lot worse because when push comes to shove, I needed the money.
14 years ago, mostly because people like you, I got high blood pressure. I started to read a lot about it in the coming years and, in my twisted mind, I even considered myself to be an expert in the filed (!?), more so because in my University times I was doing research in Biocybernetics, digital processing of biomedical signals etc. So I was on the health forums, writing about the subject like some, God forbid, doctor. I was in a heated discussion and a forum member, a Cardiologist, told me: "- Listen, go and read 9000 pages so that you can become a Cardiologist. Then come back and we can discuss". I thought for the moment, remembered my 47 exams in University Electrical Engineering department, and wholeheartedly agreed with him. I never wrote a single post about health again
The trick is to learn some things that don't require a lot of company support. "Gold standard" skills, if you like. I sell books and classes, for instance.
Those still get harder in a downturn, but you need less company agreement that your skills are good. Instead, sell directly to people who mostly don't care about your formal credentials.
It's not perfect. But even a little goes a long way.
Learn skills that are in demand in any org. I can do Sysadmin/Network Admin/IT Manager/Devops for an enterprise, a SMB, a startup, or even consulting part-time if you don't need a full-time person.
You don't need AWS? Cool, I can manage Hyper-V, Openstack, or VMware. You use .NET instead of Python? I can do that. You need me to be customer facing? Easy as pie.
I am not an IT professional. I've a business professional that uses IT to solve problems.
EDIT: /u/todayiamme, saw your reply you wanted to get in touch. I'd love to!
While I'm young (24), I'm putting my effort into cultivating that sort of attitude. Learning is something I love in general, and one great thing about our industry is how there is that you can learn and apply, and how applicable skills from things that aren't directly related actually are. Basically, what you've done is what I want to do, so thanks for the inspiration :)
bad news for you all: in 2014 I noticed, for the first time in 25 years, a slight shift toward Common Sense Hiring: companies are, still bashfully, starting to hire Computer science engineers on IT positions, just like in 60s and 70s. Mind you, this is just a signal for the trend reversion. Expect, in the next five years, full blown shift toward Common Sense Hiring - ONLY Software Engineers on Software IT positions, and ONLY Computer/Electrical Engineers on Hardware IT positions. No exceptions whatsoever.
For the first time in 25 years I, the man who was fired numerous times by people without school, "fired" a company. I gave the pink slip to a company which paid me well for two years (140,000 net) because they abused me. Why is this happening? My research shows that many high posts are shaking. For the first time in 25 years management is fearful. And when they are fearful they know how to hire, rest assured (but they still like to abuse quality workers, the WORKHORSE, along the way - the sadism is an illness). Right now, what they are doing, is the following: they take a WORKHORSE and abuse him until he dies with a view to hiring another WORKHORSE when the first one dies. And so on.
After you get 8+ years of real world experience doing what you do under belt, your education becomes irrelevant in most fields.
So if you've been lucky enough to have someone believe in you without caring about your missing degree, and you do that for enough years, you should be just fine.
> So if you've been lucky enough to have someone believe in you without caring about your missing degree, and you do that for enough years, you should be just fine.
I'd say luck comes into play in any job. You could have an ivy league background. Now someone thinks you're overqualified for the position, and picks the cheaper candidate.
In my case, it was part luck and part a numbers game. I was 17, and applied at ~30 companies for their IT roles. Why not? It was cheap for me (print resume, mail, follow up over phone) both in resources and time. I took pics with of my racks of older cheap PCs in my parent's basement doing distributed.net's RC5 challenge, all networked and cable tied, proxy configs, etc. It wasn't a hard sell to a decision maker.
That also depends on the population of your country! In India, you are worthless without a degree. People look down on non engineers. Even bachelor of science in computer science is considered crap. Your value as a developers depends only on how many other developers are out there.
I would love to see details on your 40' sailing vessel project. How much of it is your own design and how much of it involves relying on designs from others.
I'll have details up on my blog someday! I rely heavily on other designs, as I'm no nautical engineer, but I do pull elements from different craft designs (its a catamaran).
I built my CNC mill with my wife. She's helping me build my boat. We've been married 6 years, and we enjoy working on projects together. We also try to spend as much time with extended family as possible.
Awesome, glad to hear you've been able to find a balance. Sounds like a big part of that is your shared interests in these areas with your wife which allows you to focus the time there.
Out of curiosity, how much technical knowledge was needed for the CNC mill?
> Awesome, glad to hear you've been able to find a balance. Sounds like a big part of that is your shared interests in these areas with your wife which allows you to focus the time there.
Most definitely. I'm not a sit on the couch and watch TV sort of guy. I need to be doing something, and I love that my wife loves to join me in my endeavors.
> Out of curiosity, how much technical knowledge was needed for the CNC mill?
Life is all about prioritizing the things that are important to you. If I have to work less to still work on projects and have a family life, I can do that.
Engineering is simply systematic application of thought to solving problems. Breaking problems to smaller logical solvable units and then just solving them.
Engineering is not reading a few books and appearing for exams.
Can someone with some insight or relevant expertise explain why a "small explosive device" was the best way to detach? I would think there would be all sorts of mechanical hook/release devices already in existence, and designed for loads as big as him with his suit. Maybe they had to worry about ice binding such things shut?
But mostly, if you're strapped to tanks of pure oxygen, wouldn't you want to avoid proximity to any sort of combustion?
Please note that I am confident his choice here was the correct one, I just want to understand why.
So-called "explosive bolts" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrotechnic_fastener) are very commonly used in spacecraft to separate various spacecraft components (e.g., rocket stages, or payload from shroud).
I'm not familiar with the design considerations here, but lots of people remark that they seem like "the wrong solution". But, they are reliable, simple, and light weight.
When I rode regularly in college anything less than about 20mph was considered "pedestrian" and there were days in group rides that we averaged over 25mph. There were some rides averaging very nearly 30mph.
If you've got that kind of a background 12.5mph doesn't feel right. So maybe not entirely pedantic.
I just did a distance ride (100 miles per day) on my mountain bike loaded with camping gear on dirt paths. Average pace was 10mph, there are more than just carbon bikes on flat roads...
15 mph is 20% faster than 12.5 mph. A 20% difference is arguably significant in the context.
Going 20% faster on a bike relative to 12.5 mph requires more than 20% more effort, too.
8 is also 20% of 40, so 20% faster is like the difference between a ho-hum 48 minute time for a 10 km footrace, versus just cracking sub-forty. 20% faster can be a huge difference in fitness level.
All of which is irrelevant because the only reason bikes were even mentioned was to give you a point of comparison for the rate of his ascension. Only the order of magnitude matters.
And, anyway, Wikipedia helpfully explains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance) that the average urban bicycling speed in at least one city is 9.8 mph. Not that that matters in any way.
Yes, and then someone wrote, gee that number seems a little low for average bicycling speed, and it devolved into a bicycle speed discussion which is clearly irrelevant to the submitted article, just like a discussion about baseball if someone says "ball park figure".
Nevertheless, 20% is significant in bicycle speeds. It's not the 20% which is making this whole thing irrelevant. :)
Clearly it's an unpopular opinion, or it's just off-topic, or maybe both, but I've always considered an average bike pace to be 15mph, which is a far cry from a bike race, unless maybe it's up a mountain or something.
To clear up some points (I am a professional tandem skydiver and use drogues)-
A drogue is about 3 to N get feet wide. It is used for z axis stability, to slow you down a bit so that when the parachute deploys it will not explode, and finally to actually deploy the parachute.
If you do not use a drogue chute then you would use a pilot chute to deploy the parachute. The difference between a pilot and drogue chute is minimal. In fact, design wise the only difference is that after you deploy the drogue you need to pull a handle to open the container holding the parachute, at which point the drogue chute becomes a pilot chute. A deployed pilot chute will open the container without needing to pull a separate handle. Drogues are also generally much hardier than pilot chutes as they have more force acting on them.
A drogue is not a parachute. The para in parachute means it is designed to be used to slow you down enough to survive your fall. A drogue is not designed to do so.
Tandem skydiving, the kind everyone does recreationally, uses drogue parachutes to maintain what would be terminal velocity for one person. Terminal velocity for two people lying on top of each other (or one 500lb person) would be too high to safely deploy either the main or reserve parachute.
So yes, a tandem skydive is still a skydive even though you use a drogue. Eustace, even though he used a drogue, has the record for highest skydive. Arguably Baumgartner had the record for longest freefall without a drogue. But longest freefall without a drogue is a silly record to cling to. Does anyone care who has the record for driving the fastest land vehicle without a helmet?
This still is amazing. And from the perspective of a professional skydiver, Eustace broke Baumgartner's record fair and square.
Amazing how little this was publicized and promoted compared to Baumgartners jump. Undoubtedly because Redbull used FB's jump for marketing, but still a feet like this should have had more media exposure.
On a side note: If the marketing/publicity budget on this was so much lower, and the design was simpler, how much less do you think this cost compared to FB/Redbull Stratos?
> Mr. Eustace said Google had been willing to help with the project but he declined company support, worried that his jump would become a marketing event.
Seems like he did it just because he wanted to do it... And that's awesome.
Alan has been with Google for a long time, he doesn't need money. Having interacted with him on a number of occasions, this whole think shocks me. He doesn't come off as the extreme type. Always seemed more Mr Rogersish. Awesome huy to work with and for. Very impressed.
Because Alan didn't break the world record. According to article, he used drogue-chute, which is basically a small parachute, and it's WAY safer to jump with drogue.
Baumgartner, however, didn't use no drogue-chute, and has really broken the world record.
Funny that during Baumgartner's jump they kept telling that previous record was held by Joseph Kittinger, while it did not: FAI doesn't recognize it, because with drogue chute it's way easier and safer.
http://www.fai.org/records/news-of-records/37017-baumgartner... Here is the list of records set by Baumgartner. The record set today is the highest exit altitude. So yes the record is broken. Baumgartner will still have the farthest freefall and highest speed jump without a drogue. The article did not say all records broken. The most important record to the public probably is the exit altitude record.
And are you sure the drogue was used during the entirety of Alan's jump? It mentioned that he did a series of backflips and broke the sound barrier during his jump. Is that even possible w/ a drogue?
EDIT: Plus, you seem to harbor some negativity about his achievements. Two things (1) It was verified by the US Parachute Assn, and (2) perhaps this reaction is precisely why Alan didn't seek press fanfare; it's an awesome accomplishment by itself!
Wow, I had to do a double take when I saw the name. He is a well known SVP at Google, and at least when I was there he was in charge of the majority of engineering. Good for him.
The majority? Definitely not. He does run the Knowledge team, which is quite large, but Urs' org alone is quite a bit bigger. But then again, Urs hasn't jumped from the stratosphere.
Alan's org has grown and shrunk in size over time. When I joined in 2009 it was indeed "the majority of engineering" - I think he had something like 5000 people under him when the company was only a little of 20,000 strong, including all of Search, the various search property teams (which were their own departments at the time), Research, I think Commerce, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Chrome and Android were tiny - they'd just launched 6 months before - and Social and Cloud didn't exist, although they had precursor projects that were under Apps. I'm trying to remember if Apps was itself under Alan; it might've been, IIRC the three big engineering SVPs were Alan, Urs, and Bill Coughran, with Urs focused on platforms & hardware, Bill on infrastructure, and Alan on everything product-related.
Since then I think a lot of infrastructure components have been pulled out of the individual product teams they were supporting and centralized under Urs, the company as a whole has been reorganized along product area lines with each PA getting its own SVP, and many product areas that were brand new then are huge 1000-person orgs. But Google's org chart now certainly doesn't reflect what it was when any given ex-Googler left (not even when I did, a scant 5 months ago; I hear there were at least 2 big re-orgs in the last week).
To put this in perspective, if the average school room globe diameter is 0.3 meters, Alans peak elevation was 0.97 millimeters above the surface of the globe...
And for the non-metric... he went less than a 16th of an inch above a globe about a foot in diameter. It's amazing how thin our shell of sustainable atmosphere is.
There was a lot that annoyed me about the RedBull promo jump, a whole lot, but the most annoying thing is how they misrepresented his view using fisheye lenses to make it look as though the horizon curved radically for him. They wanted viewers to think he was in outer space, in that regard.
If you watch the RedBull footage, you can see when this phony effect gets turned upside down when he was upside down; in that case the earth curved radically the other way.
I doubt the distortion was intentional, I feel like going back to see what cameras they used but most action cams (GoPro, etc.) have cheap fisheye wide angle lenses rather than more expensive (and complex) rectilinear ones which would represent the horizon correctly.
As a skydiver I am super upset that I didn't know this was happening!
I'd love to see video of it and see if he had better control than Felix. We almost lost him and I wonder if Alan had implemented controls to prevent a bad spin.
On another note, I love that he used the suit only instead of a diving bell - completely simplifying the whole process. It's arguably more dangerous, but not by much.
>I'd love to see video of it and see if he had better control than Felix. We almost lost him and I wonder if Alan had implemented controls to prevent a bad spin.
The article mentions a small early parachute that is used to prevent that spin. You can also see it on the video.
Generally the pilot/drogue chute only provides z axis stability (makes sure you don't roll over onto your back) and certainly the drogue wasn't deployed during the mach transition so I don't think it would have been helping that during the phase that Felix had trouble.
Kind of bound to be the case right? Seems to be the way it works for most records, long gaps then a flurry of records back to back. I'd love to be the first Karman line re-entry.
> "Mr. Eustace cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device and plummeted toward the earth at a speeds that peaked at more than 800 miles per hour, setting off a small sonic boom heard by observers on the ground."
I was under the impression that the "faster than the speed of sound" thing was technically deceptive, since it used the speed of sound at sea-level but they were only doing that many miles up where the speed of sound was much higher. Terminal velocity should always be lower than the speed of sound, is my thinking here. If that is the case, then I wouldn't expect a sonic boom.
Is it actually the case that they have enough momentum to continue to fall that fast as they enter the denser atmosphere?
The speed of sound actually decreases, and then increases again as you go up in altitude. So when they say faster than the speed of sound, they mean the local speed of sound (hence the sonic boom).
This is explored (with graphs!) here for the case of Mr. Baumgartner's jump:
I think he built up speed in the high atmosphere were the air is thin and was still going fast when he reached denser air and thus was going faster than the speed of sound in the denser air.
May be he went up to get permission from Steve for some other hire!
Just making a joke. This sure is remarkable and I admire this. Wish I could do it one day myself.
> “It was amazing,” he said. “It was beautiful. You could see the darkness of space and you could see the layers of atmosphere, which I had never seen before.”
Hydrogen is much less expensive than helium, gives slightly better lifting performance, and is not a scarce resource. Why don't more HAB projects use hydrogen?
The only good reason I can think of, discounting the fire hazard, is the poor reputation of high pressure hydrogen tanks for the reverse Joule-Thomson effect (i.e., unlike most gasses, hydrogen heats up when expanded out of a nozzle), but according to [1] it is not enough to cause ignition.
[1] Health and Safety Executive. 'Spontaneous Ignition of Hydrogen'. Research Report RR615, 2008. URL: www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr615.pdf
Small nit: That is the price per thousand cubic feet, not million. I'm not sure how much helium they used, but I'd estimate somewhere between 10 and 100 thousand cubic feet. Still a minor cost, of course.
Red Bull used two road tankers. Also in the case of strato ballons the helium is lost to space, in the case of welding it's still contained in our earth atmosphere.
Only if there is oxygen, and there should be no oxygen inside the balloon.
Any hydrogen leak would rapidly rise away so it's actually quite safe. Certainly much safer than gasoline and we use that every day - including sparks.
This is one of the most bad-ass things I've read in a while. The fact that it was so under-covered so as _not_ to be associated with any kind of marketing makes it even cooler.
He looked absolutely nothing like a ballistic missile [1], different radar profile, totally different source/trajectory - at his peak he was 25 miles high, whereas an ICBM at midcourse is about 750 miles - and, finally he was moving way too slow - at his peak he was moving at 800 miles/hour. ICBMs in their Re-Entry phase move are tracking at around 15,000 miles/hour.
I know the ISS is moving at ~27,600 km/h and is ~10 times further away than this jump, but is there a significant engineering reason to not say... double this jumps height? 5x? ...10x?
(IANAP) The physics of a balloon. It works by having lower density than the surrounding air. As the air gets thinner with altitude, at some point the balloon is just too heavy.
Henry Spencer reckons it's been seriously considered all the way back, and he invented regular expressions, so, er, well apparently being a computer scientist gives you parachute credibility this week:
There's some heroism in daring to do something technically possible that hasn't been done before---the fact that he did it with world-class technical backing and engineering work doesn't diminish the fact that at the end of the day, he strapped into that suit and he rode it down.
Apollo 11's crew had all of NASA backing it; that doesn't make them less heroic.
They were heroic because they took those risks, at least in some part, for science, for the good of humankind. Armstrong wanted to be recognised as a geologist (cynthiologist?) more than as an astronaut. This sounds like it's just some rich guy doing it for fun. Which, y'know, best of luck to him, enjoy what you've earned, but it seems no more heroic than buying a Ferrari.
"The project was performed by the Paragon StratEx team to test spacesuit technologies for several applications, including exploration of the Earth's stratosphere, supersonic research and spacecraft emergency escape studies"
Maybe being sensational is unnecessary, but risk taking is absolutely necessary for science. Recently on HN: the story of John Paul Stapp, the fastest man on earth [1] [2]
Sensationalism, while perhaps strictly unnecessary, is inspiring, and that is very good for science. Anyway this jump was positively muted, especially compared to the publicity that Felix Baumgartner's jump got. Some attention is necessary; how else are we supposed to know about great feats people have accomplished, scientific or otherwise? Aside from news articles about the jump itself, there is a very informative website about the goals of the company behind this jump [3]
I'm not sure. They seemed to be taking the phrase "sensational risk taking" and evaluating the two parts separately. That is, considering whether risk-taking is good, and also considering whether making something sensational is good.
They argued first that risk taking is necessary, and then on top of that, gave an argument that sensationalism can have some positive consequences.
I think this (breaking the response into responses to the two parts) is probably quite distinct from a straw man, and except for potential problems from not specifically covering the interactions between the two parts, seems probably valid?
Unless they edited the post since you responded, which I can't tell if that is the case or not.
tl;dr: I don't think they were acting as if you said that?
So from my quick googling it looks like oxygen absorption lowers with pressure (~ altitude), so the higher you go the more oxygenated air you have to breathe to maintain proper oxygen levels in blood.
> He did not feel or hear the supersonic boom as he passed the speed of sound, he said. He performed two slow back flips before a small parachute righted him.
Just out of curiosity, isn't this expected? It is my extremely layman understanding that the boom happens behind the object moving supersonically, and obviously if you're going faster than the speed of sound it won't catch up to you, right?
Fighter pilots don't hear the boom when they go supersonic. That is why there have been a few cases of pilots accidentally exceeding M1.0 and doing damage on the ground.
At the altitude Mr Eustace jumped he probably didn't feel any buffeting either.
If the people on Earth heard it, he must have heard it at some point. Even if he was travelling faster than the sound wave, as he started decelerating the wave must have caught him up at some point.
I'd imagine the part of the wavefront behind him would dissipate in his wake, only undisturbed parts - those moving out to the sides - would survive to pass him? Others could potentially hear the boom that way without him hearing it.
At what point does the boundary between a high-altitude skydiving suit and re-entry spacecraft become blurred? With the right definitions someone could say that Yuri Gagarin has this record beat.
Maybe I'm being pedantic but it's possible to perform a reentry without being in orbit first. Most notable cases, the Apollo missions. They plunged directly into the atmosphere without entering orbit.
A very peculiar orbit but OK. So my next candidate is the Startdust mission. That went into a solar orbit and released a capsule to return samples to Earth on a fly by in 2006 before being sent to visit a comet in 2011. That capsule is quoted to have been the fastest reentry for a man made object at 12.9 km/s, which is faster than Earth escape velocity at sea level.
The use of atmospheric braking is a common, but not required, part of atmospheric re-entry.
It is theoretically possible, if highly inefficient, to lose orbital velocity by using propulsion and re-enter from orbit without using atmospheric braking.
To answer the original question, re-entry occurs when the atmosphere is first left and then re-entered. The definition of where this boundaries lies is ambiguous, but most definitions put it in the 80-120km range.
So Alan reached 1/2 to 1/3 of the elevation that would have been required for this to qualify as re-entry.
I know right? I would've said "yeah maybe I'll do it given the chance", but a few weeks ago, I got the chance to jump from a cliff in a river -- very safe, and everyone was doing it, but I still froze for a second. Then someone behind me went "just look ahead, don't look down!=" which is what I did! :)
He didn't pay a sherpa to carry him, he sponsored a slate of new technological inventions
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/science/alan-eustace-jumps...
>>>
Mr. Eustace said that his technical team designed and redesigned many of the components of his parachute and life-support system during the three-year development phase.
...
Mr. Eustace was carried aloft without the aid of the sophisticated capsule used by Mr. Baumgartner or millions of dollars in sponsorship money. Instead, Mr. Eustace planned his jump in the utmost secrecy, working for almost three years with a small group of technologists skilled in spacesuit design, life-support systems, and parachute and balloon technology.
<<<
Sounds like a lot of research was done on the suit.. and pressure suits that provide useful movement to the wearer are hard. I'm sure NASA will be interested in investigating the suit to see if any technology can be used in other areas. I wouldn't write it off as conspicuous consumption yet, just like I didn't write off James Cameron's marianas trench dive.
Also agree. I think your comment adds to the conversation, and you're being down-voted because people disagree with you.
It's a nice side-effect that some interesting space suit research was generated during this effort. The America's Cup produces yacht-building research too, but that doesn't change the fact that it's essentially a pastime that wealthy people throw their gobs of money at.
This article can be summed up with "Executive Has An Expensive Hobby. News at 11."
I'm not sure what you originally said, but think it was a comment I meant to respond to.
It's myopic to say something is too dangerous or doesn't produce anything and shouldn't be done. Being free to explore the limits is kind of what makes us human. Skydiving by itself used to be incredibly dangerous and something only a few thousand could do. Along came a bright engineer named Bill Booth that invented a pin that didn't stick, reducing container locks, a quick release and tandem jumps. Now millions of tandem jumps are done world wide and the incidents per jump are way lower.
When I started BASE jumping 15 years ago and saw a wingsuit jump in person my mind raced. I wondered if some day we'd get to the point you could fly through the trees like a bird/pod race combo. Now that's pretty routine and the videos on YouTube get millions of views. That came after years of dedication and design.
I know skydivers and base jumpers that live in a van, and others that live in huge houses on the California coast. It attracts all walks of life. I didn't get the hate in your original post. I tend to agree with most of the others :)
What of it? People who badly underestimate risk remove themselves from the talent pool, probably to the benefit of society - I'd rather an overconfident executive perish on some personal adventure than that they run some corporate ship aground as a proxy and ruin he livelihoods of thousdasnds of employees or impose a dangerous shock to the financial system.
Same as people going on vacation, with "nothing to show for it, could have donated to cancer research" and take a variety of terminal risks in the process.
We live for a little while, then die. Good if we can have a heckuva ride along the way, so long as it doesn't result in a net harm. This guy did it because the record was there, the experience was there, he contributed to advancing the (admittedly narrow) field involved, etc. If you've lived a good productive life, kudos in doing something fun & dramatic that may have a chance of a spectacular exit.
And you have no idea how much he _has_ contributed to cancer research or other laudable causes. The wealthy tend to give away a whole lot more than the general public is aware of.
Your point about his potential contributions to other good causes is well taken. Thank you for taking the time to compose your response.
I still think that taking death-defying risks is basically a sign of immaturity. It's a little disappointing to see it in a person who is supposed to be a leader in my field.
I look up to people who don't take extreme, unwarranted risks, whether for fun or "for science." All they have to do is have genuine skill and insight and take sensible risks for the greater good. In my opinion, which I am perfectly entitled to without people claiming that I'm detracting from the discussion, this kind of thing just promotes an unstable, manic culture in the tech world.
Maybe he didn't intend for this event to lead to anything beneficial? It seems clear he's doing it out of passion (and science, maybe). He's not spending public funds and even rejected Google's support for this project. Just because he's a Google executive doesn't mean he is obligated to fund cancer research. And how do you know if he hasn't contributed to philanthropy?
You could ask the same question - "Why are you spending X dollars on Y instead of Z? What's the value in Y?" - to almost anybody.
Perhaps you are being downvoted because you are making a very tired argument which has been and discussed many times on HN and always has the same conclusion.
Do you spend all of your discretionary income on cancer research? I'm guessing not, so why do you think someone else should?
You have done just enough research to use the right nomenclature in the wrong way. Using a drogue might not technically be freefall, but it is called drogue-fall because you're hauling ass. It is not a parachute. The para part of parachute means it will slow your decent enough to save your life. A drogue is used mainly for stability and to slow you down enough so your parachute won't explode when deployed. Deploying a drogue doesn't mean you're now "under canopy".
As to a drogue making this no longer a skydive, drogues are used in tandem skydives and are most certainly perfectly acceptable.
You're entitled to an opinion, it just so happens that your opinion is wrong.
Yes, it isn't, because it's not a skydive with a drogue, it's canopy flight.
> isn't height all that matters?
Height of... skydive?
> is using a different parachute somehow not sky-diving?
Yes. Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (agency that confirms these world records) doesn't recognize it as a free-fall.
And from my own experience -- yes, it's way different ;)
grep on "bird' at 212 comments
"bird strike' problem for aircraft, likely worse than
deer strike problem for automobiles.
question: what is the strategy to survive BIRD STRIKE problem?
please.
Also, birds could be 'long flight' dozing while flying in formation and
are NOT looking up.
Congrats. and am I off on my questioning, since this is question 122
or is the fluoride and pollutants in drinking water decreasing general
intelligence in USA like the lead did in the Roman Empire?
Your comment doesn't entirely make sense. However bird strikes are generally only a problem under 1000ft, and the parachute will have opened at that point. (You can get bird strikes at higher altitudes, but it is quite rare as the majority of bird activity is close to the ground).
I know this as I'm a pilot and I've had quite a few very close encounters with birds when taking off or landing. The plane I fly only manages 100mph, so generally the birds have time to get out of the way.
> Mr. Eustace said Google had been willing to help with the project but he declined company support, worried that his jump would become a marketing event.
2. Surviving the environmental conditions of the ascent.
3. Converting the ascent to a fall.
4. Surviving the environmental conditions of the fall.
5. Surviving subsequent contact with the ground.
6. Getting home from wherever you landed.
7. (optional) Taking good pictures and video.
Three of those seven elements are always potentially lethal, and three more could be, if not planned correctly. It's not quite the same league as jumping off a roof into a swimming pool.
> 2. Surviving the environmental conditions of the ascent.
That's what the suit is for, no ability needed from the rider
> 3. Converting the ascent to a fall.
Pressing a button
> 4. Surviving the environmental conditions of the fall.
Again, the suit
> 5. Surviving subsequent contact with the ground.
This time the parachute
> 6. Getting home from wherever you landed.
The team working with the guy
> 7. (optional) Taking good pictures and video.
Ok, so his prowess is in being able to not faint in the process and being able to hold a camera.
Compare to say, free diving, were the person needs the ability to hold his breath for a period of time, or mountain climbing where they need the physical strength to walk up a mountain several kilometers with 20kg on the back.
You have no idea about the technical challenges that come with a jump like this. Stop reducing it to "the parachute", "the team", "the suit". These are all important parts of the jump but you can't just do this stuff without the experience to control yourself.
The way you are talking, you probably think it's trivial to jump out of an airplane with a parachute. There is a lot more to skydiving than just jumping and deploying a parachute. There is a reason you need to do a lot of jumps before you can jump at high altitude, and this record-breaking jump is even harder than that.
There is a reason people who are knowledgable about skydiving are impressed by this jump (see the comments higher up on the page), and that's because they appreciate the challenges. You are unimpressed because you know very little about these challenges. This is okay if you keep your ignorance to yourself, but embarrassing otherwise.
Be fair, the nerve to do the thing at all is significant. Not like a monkey in the Mercury capsule, who after all had no say in the deal, this guy could have 'bailed out' of the project at any time. He didn't. That means something.
Stick your hand out a car window and not the force at say 70 mph. Now imagine it twice as fast. If your hand is not symmetrical you spin. I can do turns in the air with just my hands. A misplaced arm or leg is going to cause even more force and faster rate of turn.
So 12.5 mph, a little faster than the average bicycle pace. Straight up.
Works with other engineers in secret for 3 years to knock out a badass space survival suit.
And then, just for us kids, "cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device . . ." and achieves 800mph+, setting off a "small sonic boom".
I !@%! love engineers.