Felix Baumgartner Couldn't Wait To Fall from Space

A year ago, Felix Baumgartner, a 44-year-old Austrian daredevil / badass / Red Bull spokesperson, strapped himself into a tiny pod and waited for his 600-foot-high polyethylene balloon to fill with a couple million cubic feet of helium.

And then he waited some more.

He'd wait nearly three hours for that balloon to carry his pod more than 24 miles above Earth before he casually opened the door to the 3,000 pound capsule, stepped onto a tiny platform, and then plunged out into nothingness.

A minute later, he became the first man to break the speed of sound outside of a vehicle. Ten minutes later, he was back on Earth after having successfully broken Joseph Kittinger's 50-year-old skydiving record, falling faster and longer than any human in history.

No more waiting.

If you watched the webcast of the Baumgartner's jump, you were probably pretty dedicated. It happened early on a Sunday afternoon after being called off several times at the last minute due to high winds, and those attempts had already been delayed a month because of a problem with the balloon. This was all after a two-year delay due to licensing issues with the US Air Force and a lawsuit filed by a rival skydiver who wanted to break Kittinger's record first.

What I'm saying is, no one was more impatient about the whole thing than Baumgartner himself.

Last year, I met Baumgartner and Kittinger in a sort-of-not-really secret bar in the basement of Washington, D.C.'s P.J. Clarke's. Baumgartner had just completed his first test jump, a casual descent from an altitude of 71,000 feet. He was ecstatic that this whole thing was finally becoming a reality, but also eager to finally take the mantle from Kittinger—whose record was still more than 30,000 feet farther up.

"If there are two people sitting in that capsule, then you'd be talking to two of us right now," Baumgartner said. "I don't want to share the glory."

You can get an adrenaline rush from jumping out of any old plane, but it takes a rare kind of person to base jump into a pitch black cave or jump off the Christ Redeemer statue in Rio. His family saw the delays as signs, pleadings from fate—or someone—not to do it. To Baumgartner, it was just an annoyance, more things forcing him to wait.

"My friends and family said 'You don't need to do this. You've already done so many wonderful things,'" he said. "I told them, 'Don't think this isn't going to happen. This is just a break.'" You don't get remembered for planning to break a record and then not doing it.

Yesterday, Red Bull released a three-angle video of the jump. One strapped to Baumgartner's head shows his dizzying view from 120,000 feet: You can easily see the Earth's curve and the darkness beyond the horizon. From his perspective, he might as well be in space. At 24 miles above Earth, the stratosphere's air is so thin that if Baumgartner didn't take off with the same amount of force from both feet, he'd start rotating uncontrollably and would eventually pass out. The risk was so high that Red Bull decided to tape-delay the jump.

And that's essentially what happened. After jumping, Baumgartner begins spinning—slowly at first, then much faster. His heart rate goes from 140 beats per minute to somewhere over 180. The reading on the video drops to 0 for a harrowing couple seconds, probably a technical error, and then comes back. His speed tops out at 840 MPH, or Mach 1.25. There's no sonic boom. The POV cam spins so fast it makes me dizzy watching it on a tiny laptop screen.

And then, things just kind of work out. Baumgartner begins to spin slower, eventually steadying himself. His heart rate drops back down to around 140, and his speed slows. The Earth looks like the Earth you see out the window of your AirBus, not something from a NASA photo. Then, the parachute goes up. From there, it's smooth sailing. He's done it thousands of times. He lands as a world record holder.

And he's done.

When I talked to him last May, he told me that this would be his last jump. He reiterated that yesterday in a Q&A posted by Red Bull, saying he's "officially retiring from the daredevil business." He will, forever, be the guy who broke the speed of sound. He doesn't need anything else.

"In 100 years when I'm gone, people will still talk about the guy who broke the speed of sound outside of an aircraft with his own body," he told me.

One year down. So far, so good.