I. The Climb

On the morning of Sunday, October 14, last year, the Austrian parachutist Felix Baumgartner sat in a pressurized capsule at nearly 128,000 feet, floating over the wastelands of eastern New Mexico, preparing to jump out. A fragile helium balloon suspended him there in ultra-thin air, higher than jets can fly. For more than three hours he had been breathing pure oxygen to purge his blood of nitrogen against decompression sickness, or “the bends.” Like astronauts or the pilots of high-altitude reconnaissance airplanes, he wore a full pressure suit with the helmet visor down. For now the suit was deflated, allowing for relatively easy movement, but Baumgartner disliked it nonetheless. The suit stank of rubber, and when inflated it hemmed him in. Baumgartner had never liked to be hemmed in. On his forearm he had a tattoo in Gothic lettering that proclaimed, born to fly.

His goal now was to break the altitude record for a human free fall, and in the process also to exceed the speed of sound. Otherwise known as Mach 1, that speed varies with temperature but is upwards of 660 miles per hour. Baumgartner was not there to advance mankind. That was for others to claim, if they liked. His own purpose was promotional. He was a showman for the Red Bull company, which had plowed a fortune into this endeavor in order to associate its energy drink with his feats. Baumgartner, who was 43 at the time, is certainly a manly man. He is photogenic. He is fit. His fiancée was Miss Lower Austria in 2006. When he furrows his brow he looks determined and intense. On-camera he becomes the very image of a middle-aged action figure, the perfect emblem for an important market segment of middle-aged men. When I drink Red Bull, I go supersonic. I am fearless. I am an Übermensch.

Red Bull is an Austrian company, and a big deal in that town. It sells a form of intoxication like ultra-sobriety. In doing so it seems to have answered the old question about trees falling in forests when no one is around. The conclusion during energy-drink events, at least, is that nothing happens unless it happens on video—and that YouTube especially is the key. As a result Baumgartner’s capsule was hung with 15 cameras, and he himself was hung with 5. Many of these cameras had extremely wide-angle lenses that exaggerated the curvature of the horizon, and showed the earth as a distant round ball, as if Baumgartner was in space. He was not. Indeed the horizon line there was to the naked eye very nearly flat, and at 128,000 feet Baumgartner was fully 200,000 feet lower than the generally agreed upon threshold to space. He was, however, at an extremely high altitude—99,000 feet higher than Mount Everest, and higher than anyone had ever flown except in spaceships and rocket planes. Beneath him, North America stretched for hundreds of miles in shades of brown and swirls of cloud; above him, the sky had turned a deep blue black. Outside the protective walls of his capsule, the atmospheric pressure was so low—a fraction of 1 percent of the pressure at sea level—that the briefest direct exposure to it would have been fatal. And yet he was going to inflate the pressure suit, fully depressurize the capsule, allow the door to roll open, step outside into the bright light of altitude, and hop into the void. Seconds later, if all went well, he was going to break the speed of sound.

For five years a group of veteran aerospace engineers and test pilots had coalesced around this project. One of those people was the American fighter pilot and research balloonist Joseph Kittinger, whose 1960 free-fall record (Mach 0.91 from 102,800 feet) Baumgartner was proposing to break. Now 84, Kittinger was rotund, a bit deaf, slightly crippled, married to an adoring younger woman, and every bit the man he ever was. He was currently controlling the balloon from the ground and serving as the main communicator on the radio link to Baumgartner in flight.