This afternoon a man will step from his pressurised capsule and into the void, starting a fall that will last 15 minutes. If all goes well, Felix Baumgartner’s name will be etched into the record books. He will be remembered for the highest skydive – an astounding 36.5 kilometers, more than three times the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747. The Austrian will also hit a potential top speed of 1110 kilometers an hour, making him the first human to break the sound barrier outside of an aircraft.

Best of all, you can watch the whole thing play out live.

The Red Bull Stratos project is another of the popular energy drink’s attempts to push human achievement. But it’s not just for show – if Baumgartner’s dive is successful, it will open doors to new space suits and allow astronauts to safely jump from their aircraft at very high altitudes.

It’s been a long road to get here. A legal challenge needed to be sorted out and the crew had to wait for the perfect conditions to attempt the jump. They even recruited the services of Joe Kittinger, the current record-holder. In 1960 he jumped a distance of 31.8 kilometers and came just short of the sound barrier.

This is by no means safe, though the team has made sure that they could control what they can. At least two skydivers have died attempting similar heights – either from freezing to death or going into a flat spin, which drains the brain from blood. Baumgartner’s suit will protect him from the first, but since he’ll jump into a near vacuum, even a tiny tear will depressurise the suit and cause his blood to boil. There is also the matter of breaking the sound barrier – nobody is entirely sure what will happen to a human body when that happens.

If you want to watch this record in the making, head over to http://www.redbullstratos.com/live and watch the whole thing play out live.

By James Francis
Images via Facebook/FelixBaumgartner