Baumgartner Jumps from 25 Mile Altitude; Gets You Thinking… That’s a long fu@king way down…
By Rob Kall,opednews.com –
I’m watching the safe, successful 25 mile high parachute jump by Felix Baumgartner with enthusiasm and awe.
Redbull’s sponsorship looks like it definitely worked. Baumgartner jumped from over 125,000 feet, testing a new high pressure space suit. It was thrilling to watch him zero the pressure of the balloon capsule, sit on the portal of the capsule, then jump, with expectations he’d exceed, for the first time in parachute jumping history, the speed of sound.
He jumped. He landed. All went well. It was quite thrilling.
This successful jump reminds me of the hopes and dreams of the space program back in the sixties. We need to get back to that head and heart space.
This reminds me how sadly far the visions, hopes and plans for space exploration have fallen since I was a young man, reading science fiction, watching the Sci-Fi stories becoming reality.
We need an aggressive, robust space program, not just for science, not just for the commercial spin-offs that come from space technology development, but also for the hope and inspiration we experience when we observe courageous people who are at the cutting edge of human performance.
Maybe this work will require corporate sponsorship. Maybe not. But we must ramp up the exploration of space. Perhaps the best way will be to bring many nations together to work on projects, as has been done with the space station.
We need to get back to believing that humans (preferably not corporations, not single government) will land on and colonize the moon and mars, will travel to the furthest reaches of the universe.
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