Skulls in the Stars

My friend Personal Demon tipped me off to a potentially historic skydiving event that will be happening in roughly 17 days; Michel Fournier of France will attempt to break the record for the highest freefall.  Ascending in a pressurized capsule attached to a high-altitude balloon, Fournier will dive from 130,000 feet (25 miles) over the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada.

The previous record goes back to Joseph Kittinger, Air Force pilot and all-around Übermensch.  In 1960, he participated in Project Excelsior, which was implemented to study the effects of high-altitude bailout on pilots.  Kittinger left a balloon at 102,800 feet, and fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds reaching a maximum speed of 614 mph!  (Kittinger is less-known for being one of the few pilots who had to bail out of his jet in a thunderstorm.  The storms kept him aloft under parachute for 20 minutes before dumping him to the ground.)

Fournier’s group claims that their event is being done for similar medical and technological reasons, but it will at the very least be a very cool human accomplishment.  I’m staying tuned…

I finally managed to make a couple of skydives this weekend, after about a six-week hiatus.  My undesired “break” from the sport was a combination of bad weather on the weekends at home and travel on the others.  In celebration of getting back in the swing of things, I post a video of a jump I did about 8 years ago in upstate New York (below the fold):

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I broke out another of my skydiving videos to post on YouTube the other day. This one, below the fold, is what is known as a “speedstar”. Most formation skydives are meticulously planned to be “slot perfect”: that is, every skydiver has a very specific place in the formation, as in the jump I blogged about previously. A speedstar, on the other hand, is all about everybody getting together as fast as they can! Nobody leaves the plane together: everyone piles out single file and then rushes to the formation. In the video below the fold, we were doing a speedstar with 10 people (a “10-way”) and we planned two points…

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Alas, I fear I must report that I recently had a major falling-out with some of my friends. We have these sort of events all the time, but this time I managed to catch it on video, which is after the fold…

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I’m not sure what to make of this xkcd comic; after all, I’m active in 3 of these categories, including the top one, and I do take a lot of elevators…

Okay, one more post tonight (I’m really bored).  I stumbled across a fascinating article (h/t Pigspittle, Ohio) about the oldest human-powered means of transport: ice skates made of bone.  Apparently ice skating may have started in about 3000 BC in Southern Finland, which has a high density of lakes (and mosquitos, as I can personally attest).

I find this especially interesting because I’m an avid figure skater.  (I’m also getting the girlfriend involved.)  The early skating was apparently not for fun, though, but to minimize energy expenditure in travel.   The results were published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society of London.

I just finished watching the new episode of Mythbusters, in which they investigate a famous scene from the movie Point Break: Patrick Swayze leaps from a plane at 4000 feet, and Keanu Reeves hems and haws for fifteen seconds before jumping after him, sans parachute, and manages to catch up, have an argument, and finally pull the parachute some 90 seconds after the first departure, landing together.  As a skydiver myself, I found this somewhat entertaining to watch.

Mythbusters handled 3 myths:  Can you freefall 90 seconds from 4000 feet (no, unless you want to spend 60 of those seconds dead), can you have a conversation in freefall (they say no, though I’ve understood a few shouted phrases in freefall myself), and can you catch a skydiver after giving him a fifteen second head start (yes, you can fall REALLY fast in a ‘head-down’ skydiving position).

They actually missed a few dubious aspects of the Point Break scene, though, that might make good fodder for future episodes…

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