On Oct. 14, 2012 Australian daredevil Felix Baumgartner set a world record for skydiving from a height of 128,100 feet but this record has been broken by a 57-year old computer scientist: Alan Eustace, a veteran aircraft pilot and senior vice president of search giant Google.
On Friday, Eustace jumped from a large helium balloon that carried him from New Mexico to the stratosphere leaping from a height of 135,890 feet, the World Air Sports Federation confirmed.
Clad in a specially-designed space suit and a life-support system, the Google executive descended to Earth at a speed of 822 mph breaking the sound barrier. The descent lasted 15 minutes.
Eustace broke three skydiving records with his stunt but the exercise is apparently not just all about thrill-seeking and breaking records. It also involved scientific exploration.
Eustace worked with a team of engineers and aerospace experts from the Paragon Space Development Corporation, a company that specializes in life-support devices, to come up with the helium balloon that would carry him to the stratosphere and a pressurized suit that would protect him during his jump.
The program, which has been kept under public radar during development, is known as StratEx, or Stratospheric Explorer.
"What if you could design a system that would allow humans to explore the stratosphere as easily and safely as they do the ocean," Eustace said. "With the help of the world-class StratEx team, I hope we've encouraged others to explore this part of the world about which we still know so little."
Throughout the three-year development phase of the project, the team designed and redesigned many of the components crucial for Eustace's jump and the efforts eventually led to a spacesuit similar to those used by astronauts for Apollo and those based at the International Space Station (ISS).
The StratEx team also came up with a specially designed balloon, launch system and parachute as well as a stabilization device called Saber, which addressed the problem of skydivers having difficulty stabilizing themselves at high velocities.
"So much of what we did was new, from the tech that helped keep the suit cool, to the communications we used to stay in contact, to the balloon system for releasing him," said Paragon president Grant Anderson.
Anderson said that the technology the StratEx team developed could be crucial for helping people return safely from the upper atmosphere.
"One of the most amazing things we learned was how to bring somebody back from that altitude," said Taber MacCallum, who was previously from Paragon.
