Stratos
cevans | October 16, 2012Stewart Brand, writing about space colonies, observed that "if you live in a satellite, the Earth is something that goes on in your sky."
For Felix Baumgartner, the daredevil skydiver who seduced the world with his chiseled jaw and seeming invulnerability to fear (and who broke the sound barrier with his body last weekend) the Earth is something else. The satellite he leapt from, a weather balloon 24 miles above the Earth, wasn't his home. But briefly, and especially for the millions who watched the gossamer balloon float upwards to the strange blue-black gradient of space's edge, it turned…
rallain | August 25, 2010Austria seems like a nice place to visit - I have never been there. However, I am not going to Salzburg (even though I said I was). The original plan was for WOMWorld/Noika to fly me to visit Felix and the Red Bull Stratos team. It was an exciting plan.
Now there is a new plan. The new plan is for me to instead go to the ACTUAL Red Bull Stratos Jump. I know it is not Salzburg, but in my mind this is a huge upgrade.
Ok, I can't help it. This is the first thing that came to my mind.
Me: But I thought I was going to Austria. We had a deal.
WOMWorld/Nokia: I am altering the deal. Pray I…
rallain | July 24, 2010WOMWorld/Noika has invited me to travel to Salzburg Austria and visit with the Felix and the Red Bull Stratos team. I am pumped up.
Why? Why oh why you might ask. Well, I guess it is for several reasons.
First, I have several posts about the physics of the Red Bull Stratos jump. (quickly, the stratos jump has Felix Baumgartner jumping out of a balloon at 120,000 feet).
Nokia and WOMWorld get some exposure because I will blog about my experiences.
You, the readers, get to read about it.
Really, it is win-win-win. And trust me, I will find some good stuff to blog about.
rallain | May 26, 2010I am still thinking about the Red Bull Stratos Jump. Sorry, but there is just tons of great physics here. Next question - how big of a balloon would you need to get up to 120,000 feet?
I am not going into the buoyancy details of Archimedes Principle - I think that was covered fairly thoroughly with the MythBusters floating lead balloon. However, in short, here is a force diagram for a floating balloon.
For a floating balloon, the buoyancy force must equal the weight of the whole thing. It turns out that the buoyant force is equal to the weight of the gas (or fluid) the object displaces…
rallain | May 24, 2010While I am still fresh on the Space Jump topic, let me take it to the extreme. Star Trek extreme.
SPOILER ALERT
But really, is this a spoiler alert if it is from the trailer of a movie that has been out forever? Of course, I talking about the latest Star Trek movie where three guys jump out of a shuttle and into the atmosphere.
So, in light of the Red Bull Stratos jump, how would this jump compare? First, my assumptions:
This Star Trek jump is on the planet Vulcan. I am going to assume this is just like Earth in terms of gravity and density of air.
The jumpers in Star Trek have on stuff…
rallain | May 24, 2010Crazy, but I was on CNN Saturday night. They contacted me at the last minute to talk about the Red Bull Stratos Jump. Here is a screen shot to show that I am not making this up (or that I have awesome photoshop skillz).
Looking back, maybe I looked like an idiot. Really though, it wasn't my fault. I thought we were going to talk about physics. The first two questions threw me for a loop. Here are the two questions and my response (roughly paraphrased):
Will Felix survive the jump?
Answer: I guess so.
Is there a scientific reason for this jump?
Answer: I thought we were going to talk…
rallain | May 19, 2010A new video from the Red Bull Stratos Jump guys came out. Here it is:
This reminds me of an unanswered question about the Stratos jump that I didn't address on my last post on this topic. Commenter Long Drop asked about how much Felix would heat up as he falls from 120,000 feet. This is a great question. The first, off the bat answer is that he won't heat up too much. Why do I say this? Well, when Joe Kittinger jumped from over 100,000 feet and didn't melt. Still, this is a great thing to calculate.
How do you calculate something like this? I will look at this in terms of energy. For…
rallain | February 23, 2010I had so much fun creating graphs for the Red Bull Stratos Space Jump calculation, that I figured I should make some more.
Can you fall faster than terminal velocity? That is the question.
Air Resistance
Air resistance is a force exerted on an object as it moves through some stuff - air in this case. The magnitude is usually modeled as:
Rho is the density of the stuff the object is moving through
A is the cross sectional area of the object
C is the drag coefficient of the object - this depends on the shape (a cone would be different than a flat disk)
v is the magnitude of the velocity of…
rallain | February 19, 2010Red Bull is sponsoring this sky dive from really really really high up - Stratos: Mission to the Edge of Space. Seems dangerous. The basic idea is that Felix Baumgartner will take a balloon ride up to 120,000 feet and jump out. Here are some questions:
Will he reach supersonic speeds?
The Red Bull site says: "can Felix react to a 35 second acceleration to mach 1?"
How about the claim that he will free fall for 5 minutes and 35 seconds? That seems pretty short.
In 1960, Joe Kittinger jumped from 102,800 feet. Will 20,000 feet make a large difference?
Assumptions
Clearly, this can be a…