The jump—slated for summer or fall 2010 in an undisclosed locale—will provide escape-system engineers with hard-to-come-by information about the behavior of a falling body in a pressurized suit in extremely thin air and the reactions of that body to transonic and supersonic speeds. Because there’s so little air resistance up there, Baumgartner is expected to reach 690 miles per hour, rather than the 120-miles-per-hour terminal velocity of a typical free fall at lower altitude. No one has ever bailed out in a spaceflight emergency, and it isn’t clear how best to do it safely in all phases of
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