Red Bull Stratos Jump Postponed – Set For Tomorrow [VIDEO]

With winds in Roswell, New Mexico blowing in from the north at 8.5 MPH the Red Bull Stratos jump by Felix Baumgartner, slated for today, will have to be postponed.

101 9 KING FM Radio meteorologist Don Day recently said that any winds over 2 MPH could cause delays again. At this time the optimal weather conditions have been forecast for tomorrow morning, October 9th at 6 AM for launch.

Early Tuesday morning, the Austrian adventurer will don a custom-made spacesuit and ascend high over the New Mexico desert in a capsule suspended beneath an immense helium balloon, then fall to earth from 120,000 feet. His primary goal is breaking an unofficial record Col. Joe Kittinger set with a similar leap from 102,800 feet in 1960. But, like Kittinger, Baumgartner also hopes to add to our understanding of the frontiers of flight.

 

Baumgartner expects to exceed the speed of sound – about 700 mph at that altitude – during a free fall that will last about five minutes, something no one has ever done. For all our knowledge about high-altitude flight and space travel, there’s still a lot we don’t know about what would happen if a pilot aborts a mission and ejects at the edge of the atmosphere. The air is so thin at such heights that it is easy to tumble out of control, a situation that can lead to unconsciousness and even death.

 

“Red Bull Stratos is an opportunity to gather information that could contribute to the development of life-saving measures for astronauts and pilots – and maybe for the space tourists of tomorrow,” Baumgartner said in a statement. “Proving that a human can break the speed of sound in the stratosphere and return to earth would be a step toward creating near-space bailout procedures that currently don’t exist.”