So it's Tuesday and I'm still thinking about Sunday, which tells you something. Sunday was the Baumgartner jump, and if you were anywhere near a computer, a TV, or a coworker with a smartphone, you already know what I'm talking about. Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian guy, rode a helium balloon up to 128,100 feet over Roswell, New Mexico and then just stepped out. Free fall for something like four and a half minutes. Broke the sound barrier on the way down, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2012 about a human body with no vehicle attached to it.
I want to talk about the jump a little, but honestly what's stuck with me more is watching everyone else watch it.
I was at my desk when it started (yes, on a Sunday, don't ask, deadline stuff) and I had the YouTube stream open in one tab doing actual work in the other. Around the time he actually stepped off the platform, the stream buffered. Just froze, spinning wheel, right at the moment. I sat there yelling at my monitor like that was going to fix anything. Ended up refreshing three times and watching the recap instead of the live moment, which is such a specifically 2012 kind of disappointment. We finally get a live global event that isn't a Super Bowl or an election, and the infrastructure just kind of buckles a little under the weight of it. I saw somewhere that the concurrent viewer count on the stream was in the millions, something like 8 million at once, which if true is an absurd number for a single YouTube broadcast. No wonder it choked for a second.
The other thing nobody talks about enough is how many times this got scrubbed before it actually happened. There was an attempt earlier in the month, I want to say around October 9th, that got called off because of wind gusts messing with the balloon on the ground. Anyone who's ever tried to fly a kite on a bad day knows a 55-story balloon made of paper-thin plastic is not going up in gusty conditions, so that part made sense, but it meant the whole internet had already gotten emotionally invested and let down once before Sunday actually delivered. I think that's part of why the reaction felt so big. We'd been primed for a week.
The jump itself, once it actually happened, was weirder than I expected. Not the falling part, the falling part looked exactly like you'd think, tiny dot against blue-black sky getting bigger. What got me was the part in the middle where he started spinning, this flat, uncontrolled spin that you could hear mission control getting tense about over the radio. There's a guy named Joe Kittinger who did the previous record jump back in 1960 and he was literally the voice talking Baumgartner through it from the ground, which is a detail I love way more than I probably should. Anyway he pulled out of the spin himself before the chute deployed, which honestly seems like the actual hardest part of the whole thing to me, harder than the jump itself.
Small complaint, and I know this is a nothing complaint in the scheme of a guy breaking the sound barrier with his body: the Red Bull branding on every single frame of that footage was a lot. I get it, they funded the whole program, fine, but there's something a little exhausting about watching what's genuinely one of the more remarkable things a person has done and having a logo baked into the capsule, the suit, the helmet cam borders, the whole production. I don't have a solution for this, I just noticed it about forty separate times during the livestream and it started to grate a little by the end.
Also worth saying, quietly, because I know every tech blog on the planet is going to be all Apple-invite-this and iPad-mini-that in the next week or two since the invites already went out for the 23rd. I'm sure I'll write about that when it happens. Today I just wanted to write about the balloon.
Anyway. Back to my actual deadline, the one I was supposedly working on during all this.