One of the most curious aspects of Felix Baumgartner’s incredibly impressive leap from space is how little of it we saw. Once Baumgartner stepped off his perch, 24.2 miles above Earth’s surface, all we saw from the ground was a little, bitty white dot zipping perilously towards us. And if you’re anything like me, about 30 seconds into that free fall, you started to wonder: “Is he spinning? He’s spinning. Is he supposed to be spinning like that?” The quick answer to that question is no. The longer answer is nothing stops Fearless Felix.On Monday morning, Team Felix finally released the helmet cam footage from the jump. He’s definitely spinning. It’s not such a big deal now that we’ve seen Baumgartner land safely on the ground, but when it was happening, that spinning was scary. One of the big risks of the jump was that Baumgartner would break into a flat spin and, unable to stabilize himself, he would accelerate and basically spin so fast that the centrifugal force tore him into pieces. This did not happen, and now we know that Baumgartner wasn’t even worried about that. He was worried about breaking the sound barrier. “When I was spinning first 10, 20 seconds, I never thought I was going to lose my life but I was disappointed because I’m going to lose my record,” the daredevil said after his jump. “I put seven years of my life into this.”Now we know that Baumgartner did manage to stabilize himself, and he did manage to go supersonic. “Of course it was terrifying,” he said, adding that he almost passed out. “I was fighting all the way down because I knew that there must be a moment where I can handle it.” Ultimately, Baumgartner hit mach 1.24, or 833.9 miles per hour. When he broke the sound barrier, he didn’t even feel it thanks to the pressurized suit that was custom-built for the jump. At that speed, Baumgartner not only grabbed the record for the first supersonic skydive but also the fastest moving human without propulsion. The height of the 24.2-mile jump won him another record.The only record that Baumgartner didn’t break was the longest free fall. Baumgartner pulled the rip cord at four minutes and 19 seconds, just shy of the four minutes and 36 second free fall record set by his mentor and mission control chief, Joe Kittinger. And that’s not such a bad thing, says Baumgartner: “I was putting everything out there, and hope for the best and if we left one record for Joe — hey, it’s fine.”
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