Skydiver Felix Baumgartner lands highest ever jump

Daredevil athlete Felix Baumgartner has landed safely after jumping from a balloon nearly 37km above the Earth in a death-defying free fall that could make him the world’s first supersonic skydiver.

Baumgartner climbed into the stratosphere in a pressurised capsule carried by a helium balloon and then jumped into a near vacuum at about 128,000 feet (39,000 meters).

He aimed to set four world records, including jumping from the capsule to become the first person to break the speed of sound in a skydiving free fall.

Earlier, cheers broke out as the craft took flight at 9:30am local time (15:30 GMT) on Sunday in US state of New Mexico. The enormous balloon rose, then pulled into the air a capsule containing Baumgartner.

His mother wept as she watched the launch, which had been scrapped several times during the previous week by high winds.

The 30 million-cubic-foot (850,000-cubic-metre) plastic balloon, is about one-tenth the thickness of a Ziploc bag, or roughly as thin as a dry cleaner bag.

Baumgartner aims to break a 52-year-old high altitude parachute jump record held by project adviser Joe Kittinger.

In 1960, Kittinger, now a retired US Air Force colonel, jumped from a balloon flying at 31,333 metres and fell for four minutes and 36 seconds before opening his parachute.

Baumgartner hopes to top that with a jump from 120,000 feet and free fall for five minutes and 35 seconds.

There is so little air in the upper reaches of the atmosphere that after about 30 seconds of free fall, Baumgartner should be moving faster than the speed of sound, which is roughly 1,110kph at that altitude.

Among the risks Baumgartner faces is the chance that his supersonic body will trigger shock waves that could collide with the force of an explosion. But Baumgartner’s medical team doesn’t believe this situation is very likely because the air in the stratosphere would be too thin to carry the waves.

No human has broken the sound barrier during freefall, at least not intentionally.

On January 25, 1966, Bill Weaver, a US test pilot aboard an SR-71 Blackbird aircraft, was ejected from his damaged plane at Mach 3.18 – more than three times faster than the speed of sound – and survived.