Twenty-four miles above the earth and with 8 million people watching over the Internet, Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the sound barrier on Sunday. The jump, which was part of the Red Bull Stratos project, was monitored by a crew of 300 people from the ground in Roswell, New Mexico. The 43-year-old Austrian broke speed records, traveling over 800 mph, after fighting off thin air, fog in his visor and his own claustrophobia.
The jump comes just a few months after President Obama asked for $17.7 billion to keep NASA running. Even though that’s a lot of money, that is the lowest amount NASA has received in four years. With the retirement of the shuttle program, and the private company SpaceX launching its own Dragon spacecraft, it seems that the era of NASA may be coming to end.
Baumgartner’s five-year project , financed by Red Bull Energy Drink, culminated yesterday when not only altitude and speed records were smashed, but a new space suit and other data were tested. According to Joe Kittinger, a former Air Force colonel who previously held records now broken by Baumgartner, “Future astronauts will wear the spacesuit that Felix test-jumped today.” The project also set out to test possible escape plans for astronauts and to see how the human body held up after soaring past the sound barrier.









