Watching a Guy Fall From Space on a Stream That Kept Buffering
So I did basically no work between 11am and 1pm today. I'm not even sorry about it.
Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a capsule at something like 128,000 feet this afternoon, and I watched almost the whole thing on the Red Bull Stratos YouTube channel, refreshing my browser like an idiot every time the picture froze. Which, for the record, happened a lot. If you somehow missed it: guy rides a balloon roughly 24 miles up over Roswell, New Mexico, steps off a platform, free-falls for something like four and a half minutes, and apparently breaks the sound barrier with his own body on the way down before the chute opens. I still don't fully understand how that doesn't just... rip you apart. Nobody at my office could explain it either, we all just stood around someone's monitor making the same face.
Here's the part that's actually stuck with me, though, and it's not the jump itself. It's the stream.
YouTube was reportedly pushing this thing to something north of 8 million people watching at once, which if that number holds up is a live streaming record by a wide margin. Think about that for a second: a guy standing on a step outside a capsule at the edge of space, and the bottleneck wasn't the rocket science, it was whether YouTube's servers could keep up with the entire internet hitting refresh at the same moment. Mine buffered right as he was climbing out onto the platform. Ten agonizing seconds of a spinning wheel and I genuinely thought I was going to miss the actual jump. I did not miss it. But I've never been that annoyed at a progress indicator in my life.
It's a weird kind of milestone, honestly. Nobody's going to remember "the YouTube live infrastructure held up okay" the way they'll remember "man breaks sound barrier in freefall," and that's fair, that's how it should be. But I've been doing this blog since November of last year and I've watched a lot of "big internet moment" type events happen in real time now, and this is the first one where the delivery mechanism felt like it was actually being tested at a scale nobody had really planned for. Election night stuff, product launches, even the London Olympics streams back in the summer — none of those felt like the whole internet was pointed at one single feed the way this did today.
A few other things worth mentioning while I'm here:
- The mission control audio was oddly calming. Very NASA-adjacent in tone, lots of clipped confirmations, "copy that," heart rate readouts. Somebody on the team clearly grew up watching Apollo footage.
- The suit itself is its own small miracle of engineering and I haven't even scratched the surface of how the pressure suit, the parachute rigging, and the onboard cameras all had to work at temperatures that would kill a normal camera battery in minutes. Maybe a longer post on that later if I can find good technical writeups.
- Baumgartner apparently went into a flat spin for a bit during the fall before stabilizing, which the commentary sort of glossed over in the moment and only in the replays does it look as sketchy as it apparently was.
I keep thinking about how different this would have looked five years ago. No YouTube live at this scale, no way for a random guy at his desk in whatever city to pull this up next to his email and just leave it running in a tab all morning. Instead this was basically appointment television except the appointment was "whenever the wind cooperates," and it got scrubbed twice already this month before today's attempt actually went off. My officemate had literally set a phone alarm for this, twice, and canceled it twice before today.
Anyway. Back to actual work now, or at least I should be. If you didn't catch it live there are already replay clips floating around, though I'd bet the full unedited stream footage is worth tracking down later just for how weirdly quiet those last few seconds before he stepped off actually were. No music, no dramatic narration, just wind noise and someone counting down.
Good day for the internet. Rough day for anyone who was supposed to be productive.