tjwgrr

This guy may have to change his name to "Phil"......


Man To Fly At Speed Of Concorde

A skydiver is planning a record-breaking jump from 130,000ft which would see him break the sound barrier as he falls to Earth.
Frenchman Michel Fournier, 57, aims to travel at speeds of around 1,000mph - almost as fast as Concorde - as he attempts to set or break four world records.

The former French army major hopes to be the first person to go through the sound barrier in freefall and to set the record for the fastest freefall.

Daredevil

He also hopes to break the existing records for the highest parachute jump and the highest flight in a balloon.

Bristol-based Cameron Balloons, which created the world-beating Breitling Orbiter, is creating a specially designed polythene balloon to take the daredevil to his required jump height - almost 25 miles up.

The canopy will be around 170 times the size of an average balloon, at 510,000 cubic metres (18 million cubic feet), and will be around 95 metres high, measuring around 105 metres in diameter.

Cosmic rays

The journey up to the jumping height will take around three hours but once he's deflated the balloon, Mr Fournier's descent will take just six minutes and 25 seconds.

Major Fournier will wear a spacesuit to allow him to breathe and protect him from the extremely low temperatures, which can drop as low as -90C plus wind chill factor, as well as from ultraviolet and cosmic rays.

DeltaFlot

Not exactly true, the NASA progam had two guys from +100,000 ft, one guy never broke the sound barrier because his drogue chute opened prematurley. the 2nd guy to do it did break the sound barrier, but at that altitude you don't have to go too fast. like 400 mph or so.

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June 8, 1967
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AlphaSigOU

That would be USAF Capt. (later Col.) Joseph Kittinger, who did the jumps as part of 'Project Man-High' for the Air Force and NACA in the mid-1950s (NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, pronounced 'en-ay-cee-ay', not 'nack-a') was the forerunner of NASA, which was formed on October 1, 1958.) Col. Kittinger is very much alive today, and flies out of Orlando Executive airport.

The speed of sound is a factor of temperature and altitude. At higher altitudes and lower temperatures, the speed required to achieve Mach 1 is less than that of sea level -- approximately 760 mph on a standard atmosphere day (59 degrees F).

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Chuck Corway (AlphaSigOU)

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