by Jack
How High’s the Sky and Other Trivia
Most commercial aircraft fly about 6 miles up, military jets have been known to go as high as 19 miles, but to reach space you’re going to have to go much farther, about 62 miles or 380,000 feet. This is also the edge of the Van Allen belts. The inner Van Allen Belts magnetically shield the Earth’s surface from high energy particles. It extends from 100km (62 miles, 33,000 feet) up to 10,000km (6,200 mil, 3.3 million feet).
Low earth orbiting satellites can be found around 100 miles up. Our space station is 73 miles beyond that.
How High Can Humans Go Without An Oxygen Tank? As land born creatures most of us can’t go above 8,000 feet without risking altitude sickness. Although some humans who have lived a long time in high altitudes have developed a resistance to this phenomena and a hand full of them have climbed Mt. Everest (29,000 ft) without taking along any oxygen.
The Highest Parachute Drop: In the 1950’s we wanted to test the limits of how high we could parachute back to earth. High in the stratosphere U.S. Air Force tests showed that dummies spun wildly in free fall, often up to 300 revolutions per minute! No human could handle this. A stabilizer chute was added and the problem seemed solved and human tests were conducted up to 73,000 feet. Then in 1960, a helium filled balloon carried a man to 103,800 feet and leveled off. The lone pilot, Joseph Kittinger stepped out the door and fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, with only a small stabilizer chute to slow him ever so slightly, setting a still-standing world record for the longest parachute free-fall (although some authorities do not count this as a free-fall record because of the use of the stabilizer).
As he fell earthward, Kittinger said he had no sense of speed although he was traveling at about 740 mph! It was only when he closed in on the cloud layer that he truly sensed his speed.
At an altitude of 17,500 feet (5,300 m), Kittinger opened his main chute and landed safely in the New Mexico desert. The whole descent took 13 minutes and 45 seconds and set the current world record for the highest parachute jump. That was quite a distance between steps! Its hard to wrap your head around falling for almost 14 minutes, I can’t even go that long in one of my seeming endless falling dreams!
This year a French parachutist, Michel Fournier, hopes to break that record with a jump from 130,000 feet and then fall at 1.3 times the speed of sound, another record. The exact date has not been announced, but it is expected to take place in Saskatchewan, Canada, possibly in August of this year. A 2008 attempt ended badly when the balloon left without him, lets hope he’s not late for the next launch.
Just think if you were to jump from 100,000 feet and had one of those glide suits, you would land in another time zone.
Toby, I’m not sure you could hold your arms out that long, or what would happen when you started to hit thicker air, your arms might fold up like a broken stick behind your back! After all you would be traveling at about 500-600 mph or more, thats some wind resistance!
Human yard dart, lol.