What's it like to plummet to Earth when your starting point is 24 miles above its surface? What's it like to free fall at 833.9 mph — 140 mph faster than the speed of sound?
When the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner made his great leap from space last year, it was not only the record-breaking nature of the jump that inspired the Earth-bound. It was also, and more so, the video of the leap — the camera shot heard 'round the world. The YouTube version of the dive went immediately viral. (It currently has more than 35 million views.) The footage gave people a taste — a spinning, heavy-breathed, terrifying-even-through-a-computer-screen taste — of what it was like to be in Baumgartner's shoes. Or at least in Baumgartner's chute.
Now, to mark the record-breaking dive's one-year anniversary, Red Bull (Baumgartner's sponsor for the dive) has released another video of Baumgartner's freefall — this one explicitly shot from Baumgartner's point of view. It's the same spinning and breathing and terror-mongering you might recognize from the originally published video, except even more intimate. And even more exhilarating.
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Image: Cyril Attias
This article originally published at The Atlantic here
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