Travelling into the stratosphere with Felix Baumgartner and Red Bull
When Neil Armstrong took one small step for man, he did so with grainy live images beamed back to Earth. Many houses still didn’t have a television in 1969, so many couldn’t watch him. When Austrian skydiver/adventurer/extreme sportsman, Felix Baumgartner, on the Red Bull Stratos project, today broke numerous records, he was watched on a myriad of communications devices. From iPads to smartphones, from laptops, to a basic TV, we were able to watch the climb into the stratosphere with him, metre by metre, and then travel with him as he fell from it, from our living rooms, from a Starbucks, from the street, from a bus, indeed from anywhere with cellular coverage.
Wearing an exoskeleton suit that made him seem like a mixture of Robert Downey Junior’s Iron Man and a Space Shuttle astronaut, Baumgartner experienced what no other human has done – he went supersonic, in an unaided freefall, and we were all there with him. Who knows how his feat will be remembered? Baby Boomers had Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. The rest of us saw a man practically jump off of it!
It would be interesting to know where and on what platform you watched him. Mine was a good old fashioned laptop.
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As if proving how our access as well as our curiosity to potentially history making events (especially those of a dangerous or risky element) has increased, Felix Baumgartner broke yet another record when he leapt from the stratosphere – his supersonic freefall became the most watched event ever on You Tube.
Perhaps when NASA gets its Shuttle replacement up and running, we’ll be able to ride in the cockpit alongside the astronauts, or sit with mission control, from the comfort of our favourite cafeteria, or sit in a park and watch it. By then we’ll most likely watch it through our Google Glasses (or iGlasses if Apple gets there first), and disconnect from external interference.
Comment by Kelvin Wright | October 20, 2012 |