Yeah but what I want to know is, for someone supposedly so cool, why did Kittinger have his t-shirt on back-to-front when he greeted Baumgartner?

Even the longer, 4:25 video only shows a few seconds of the actual jump - not much more than Kittinger's record-breaking jump. Maybe Red Bull or Discovery or someone else is holding all the good footage for a later video? It seems a shame to go through all the effort and expense to do the stunt, and then not get decent footage.

In reply to this comment by Hybrid:
A stupid advertising gimmick? A marketing activity? Except for the fact that everybody who has tried the record since Kittinger in 1960 has died attempting it...

Not really sure I can agree with the sceptics on this one.

*quality.


Thanks man

A stupid advertising gimmick? A marketing activity? Except for the fact that everybody who has tried beating the record since Kittinger in 1960 has died attempting it...

Not really sure I can agree with the sceptics on this one.

*quality.

Actually, this is what falling from space looks like...
Joseph Kittinger did it on August 16, 1960 from the Excelsior III at 102,800 feet. True, the shuttle boosters jettison ~150K ft, but still, this is a person doing it =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVanXFKS8DM

-- Dave

I remember reading about Kittinger's big jump; he lost pressure in his suit to one of his hands, which painfully swelled-up during his ascent (obviously he didn't abort... badass).


Also, another pressure suit failure blacked him out on a lower (but still insanely high) jump, and he only survived because an automatic parachute opened.

(... oh, this is covered pretty well in his wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger#Project_Excelsior )

Apparently on the descent where he was blacked out he started spinning, and built up to 22g's of force on his extremities! Thanks wikipedia!



>> ^dannym3141:

1 blew my balls off. Nearly had a panic attack just placing myself in his position.
Says i, sat in this computer chair eating maltesers.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'jumps, base jumping, sky diving, travis pastrana, kittinger, dnb' to 'jumps, base jumping, sky diving, travis pastrana, kittinger, dnb, acrophobia' - edited by burdturgler

This is documentary footage of Joseph Kittinger, a test pilot who holds the record for the highest, longest free fall. The music in the background is Boards of Canada, because this edit is the first half of a Boards of Canada music video ( http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=11718 )

I saw an interview with Kittinger once, and a cool side story about this dive is that he was to abort if anything went wrong... well one of his gloves failed to seal properly, so one of his hands nearly froze off as he was ascending.