Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of fifty-six.
In an astonishing feat over Roswell, New Mexico, Felix Baumgartner accomplished his long-standing goal of the highest (128,000 feet) and fastest (supersonic!) successful free-fall in history. Baumgarther. For those who watched it live, either on television or the Web, it was a captivating, nerve-wracking, genuinely amazing sight. HEre are highlights of Felix’s jump:
Luke Dittrich, who spent time with Felix’s team in 2010, writes about why this matters:
Fifty television channels covered the jump live, seven-million people watched it stream online, and @redbullstratos has 235,000 followers and counting. But beyond the dazzle, beyond the slickness and the spectacle, is Felix’s achievement really that important?
It is. He’s demonstrated that human beings can safely fall further, and faster, than was previously known to be possible. This has real applications in the development of the emergency systems that will be essential for the advancement of manned spaceflight. For humans to finally reach further afield, for us to break our current forty-year-long holding pattern, we’ll need to make giant leaps in both rocket and safety technology. Dr. Jonathan Clark, one of the members of the team that made Felix’s feat possible, lost his wife, the astronaut Laurel Clark, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up at an altitude very close to the altitude from which Felix jumped. The lessons learned on Sunday might help us avoid similar catastrophes in the future.
Beyond that, there’s something refreshing about the idea that millions of people spent at least a few minutes marveling at the old-fashioned exploits of a brave man in a spacesuit. The current doldrums of our national space program have nothing to do with a lack of interest on the part of the public. We’re still fascinated. We still yearn to go up, higher and higher.
Truly admirable.