Man falls to earth at speed of sound?

I saw this video recently and it appears to be impossible to me. I dont know alot about the earths atmosphere but this guy go 30 times higher in the air than jet liners can go....i believe thats what it said. It says he then jumps and falls back to earth at the speed of sound. This is where my question comes from....Would he or would he not burn up in earths atmosphere?


Heres the link.
www.thatvideosite.com...

No. He was inside the atmosphere already. The part that burns you up is when you are in space, and reenter through it. He was at around 100,000 feet when he jumped. True story btw, I've seen interviews with him.

i looked into this and the first thing i noticed is that they couldnt be talking about 30 times the altitude of airliners (32000ft.) 32000x30=960,000. Thats 181 miles. The Thermosphere is about 50 miles and is the upper levels of the atmosphere..

heres what i dug up..

"On 16 August 1960, US Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger entered the record books when he stepped from the gondola of a helium balloon floating at an altitude of 31,330 m (102,800 feet) and took the longest skydive in history. As of the writing of this supplement 39 years later, his record remains unbroken.

The air is so thin at this altitude that it would make for a moderate laboratory vacuum on the surface of the earth. With little atmosphere, the sky is essentially black and the sun's radiation is unusually intense despite polar temperatures.

Sitting in my gondola, which gently twisted with the balloon's slow turnings, I had begun to sweat lightly, though the temperature read 36 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Sunlight burned in on me under the edge of an aluminized antiglare curtain and through the gondola's open door.

The density of air at 30 km is roughly 1.5 % that at sea level and thus drag is essentially negligible.

No wind whistles or billows my clothing. I have absolutely no sensation of the increasing speed with which I fall. [The clouds] rushed up so chillingly that I had to remind myself they were vapor and not solid.

This is not true for skydivers at ordinary altitudes, which is why they reach terminal velocity and cease to accelerate.

According to Captain Kittinger's 1960 report in National Geographic, he was in free fall from 102,800 to 96,000 feet and then experienced no noticeable change in acceleration for an additional 6,000 feet despite having deployed his stabilization chute. This gave him an unprecedented 3900 m (12,800 feet) over which to accelerate. At such extreme altitudes the acceleration due to gravity is not the standard 9.81 m/s2, but the slightly lower value of 9.72 m/s2. Using these numbers, it is possible to calculate the maximum theoretical velocity experienced during this record-setting jump. The result is amazingly close to the value recorded in National Geographic.



As one would expect the actual value is slightly less than the theoretical value. This agrees with the notion of a small, but still non-zero, amount of drag.

At nine-tenths the speed of sound, Captain Kittinger also holds the record for the greatest speed attained by a human without the use of an engine. The standard value of the speed of sound in air at 31,000 m is 300 m/s (670 mph).

Given this, why then do so many sources report that Kittinger exceeded the speed of sound? One possible answer comes from the relatively obvious similarity between Kittinger's self-reported value of 614 mph and the most frequently misreported value of 714 mph (319 m/s). Somebody must have heard 614 but entered 714 accidentally into some officious document (like an encyclopedia). Some other people read the error and then reported it as fact. Many more people read these "facts"and suddenly nearly everyone was remembering the day Captain Kittinger broke the sound barrier. Another factoid is born."

Woot, okay thanks for clearing that up for me!

turbokid--excellent post Not that I don't believe you, but where did you dig that up at? I've never even heard of this before; sounds like it'd make an interesting read.

i guess i could have posted the link.. sorry guys.


heres where i found it about half way down. it also talks of other aspects of the velocity of falling objects and such.. kinda cool.. enjoy.



hypertextbook.com...

Not to nitpick, but at the altitudes we are dealing with here the density of the air, and the resulting true speed of sound, are vastly higher than at sea-level speed of sound.

It's apples and oranges. This guy got nowhere near the speed of sound.

I thought terminal velocity was the fastest any free-falling object could fall. That's nowhere near the speed of sound.

Am I wrong?

Peace

edit: yeah, like the guy above me said.

[edit on 26-1-2006 by Dr Love]

At 102,000 feet the speed of sound is 676.5089 (speed of sound drops the higher up you are)

If he was traveling at 614 MPH, his true airspeed would have been 533 (aprox) and he reached mach 0.9076

All aprox without knowing actual temp and pressure.

www.aerospaceweb.org...

- One Man Short

Uhm, you're exactly backwards here. The higher the altitude, the less dense the air, the SLOWER the speed of sound is.


www.factmonster.com...

The film "The Right Stuff" and the book it is based on made the name Chuck Yeager a household term, even though before, he was barely known for his phenomenal feats, eclipsed by the original Mercury astronauts. I would have to say that Captain Joseph Kittinger must have had the same kind of stuff to take that ride, up and down.

If you have taken any basic Physics class in High School... you would know the correct formulas and such to calculate Velocity, time, etc. Using the different air resistences and the pull of gravity (9.81 m/s^2), you should be able to figure out fairly easily how high one would have to be to travel at Mach 1, and you could see how fast he himself actually went. I'm actually interested in doing the work... but that might take a while...

speed of sound is relative. at sea level it's about 1100 ft/s at 100,000 feet it is quite a bit slower so it would be quite easy to go faster than the speed of sound

[edit on 30-1-2006 by bigx01]

If Joe Kittinger says he went through the speed of sound, then that is good enough for me. He was a test pilot for God's sake and knows all about this kind of stuff.

According to the July, 1999 issue of Aviation History magazine he was also a pilot in Vietnam with one Mig credited and was shot down and held prisoner in North Vietnam. He was also the first to pilot a balloon solo across the Atlantic in Sept of 1984. Aviation History also credits him with exceeding the speed of sound.

I forgot to mention that his free fall was four and a half minutes. WOW!!

[edit on 1-30-2006 by groingrinder]

[edit on 1-31-2006 by groingrinder]

The effect of terminal velocity only occurs because the force of air resistance balances out the force of gravity. At high altitude where the air is thin, the terminal velocity would be much higher than it would be for a normal skydiver until the diver fell into denser air and slowed down.

The official statements, from where it happened.

"Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr. stepped out of an open balloon gondola at 102,800 feet on August 16, 1960, in an attempt to evaluate
techniques of high altitude bailout. Capt Kittinger’s jump lasted 13 minutes reaching a velocity of 614 miles per hour. That jump broke
four world records: highest open gondola manned balloon flight, highest balloon flight of any kind, highest bailout, and longest free fall."

www.holloman.af.mil...

its not that he was allready in the atmosphere its thats he wasnt going fast enough to burn up..the reason the space shuttle heats up is it going like 18 thousand miles an hour a far cry from 614
also actually his glove did take on thermal damage
in the edge of our atmosphere the air is almost none existant it is slowly slowing nown the space shuttle... if it were as thick up there as it were down here the space shuttle would turn its a fire ball as soon as it touched it at18000 miles an hour....most of the heavy atmospher is under 11 miles

Joe Kittinger did not exceed the speed of sound during his fall, nor did he claim to have done so. The belief that he did emerged years later when someone misprinted the peak speed he reached during his jump. The actual speed was 614 mph (about Mach 0.9) but many sources still incorrectly state that he reached 714 mph (Mach 1.05).

Even so, Kittinger still holds the record for the highest speed ever reached by a person in freefall. Several other parachute experts have announced attempts to break his record in recent years and exceed Mach 1 in the process, but none have been successful so far. You can read more about Kittinger, his records, and those hoping to break them here:

www.aerospaceweb.org...

I would bet that was a female dog. I can't understand a freefall from that height. It sounds unreal.

What exactly is terminal velocity? Ive heard of it but dont know the exact definition or anything.