I see the French attempt to beat his record failed, but they plan to try again this year. --
Le Grand Saut
Fournier has attempted to make record breaking freefall jumps on three occasions. In 1998, the French space agency chose Fournier to conduct a record jump to test the ability of astronauts to survive reentry without a space craft. This project was quickly canceled. In 2003, Fournier attempted his first privately-financed jump but the balloon ripped while being filled. The New York Times reports that Fournier has spent "nearly $20 million" on his two private attempts.[6]
Fournier was scheduled to carry out the Grand Saut (Big Jump) project in May 2008, which would have seen him ascend to 40 kilometres (25 mi) in a balloon and freefall 34 kilometres (21 mi) to earth before opening his parachute at 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) to go.[7] In the process he was expected to attain a speed in freefall faster than the speed of sound,[8] and reach speeds upward of 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km/h). His freefall was expected to last 15 minutes.[9] If successful, this would have broken records previously held by Joseph Kittinger, who set the previous parachute record by jumping from 31,333 metres (102,799 ft) in 1960 (with a small parachute for stability) under Project Excelsior; and Roger Eugene Andreyev from the Soviet Union, who jumped from 24,483 metres (80,325 ft) in 1962, setting the longest free fall record.
The jump was expected to take place over the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada. After several delays due to weather, the attempt was made on 27 May 2008, but the balloon detached from its capsule as it was being inflated and floated away.[10] Another attempt was made on 16 May 2010 which was unsuccessful due to the skydiver's reserve parachute deploying inside the capsule during a pre-launch test while the balloon was being filled.[11]
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Also see
MOOSE
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the animal, see moose.
MOOSE, originally an acronym for Man Out Of Space Easiest but later changed to the more professional-sounding Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment, was a proposed emergency "bail-out" system capable of bringing a single astronaut safely down from Earth orbit to the planet's surface.
The design was proposed by General Electric in the early 1960s. The system was quite compact, weighing 200 pounds (90 kilograms) and fitting inside a suitcase-sized container. It consisted of a small twin-nozzle rocket motor sufficient to deorbit the astronaut, a PET film bag six feet (1.8 metres) long with a flexible quarter-inch-thick ablative heat shield on the back, two pressurized canisters to fill it with polyurethane foam, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.
The astronaut would leave his vehicle in a space suit, climb inside the plastic bag, and then fill it with foam. The bag had the shape of a blunt cone, with the astronaut embedded in its base facing outward. The rocket pack would protrude from the bag and be used to slow the astronaut's orbital momentum enough so that he would reenter Earth's atmosphere, and the foam-filled bag would act as insulation during the subsequent aerobraking. Finally, once the astronaut had descended to 30,000 feet (9 km) where the air was sufficiently dense, the parachute would automatically deploy and slow the astronaut's fall to 17 mph (7.6 metres per second). The foam heat shield would serve a final role as cushioning when the astronaut touched down and as a flotation device should he land on water. The radio beacon would guide rescuers.
General Electric performed preliminary testing on some of the components of the MOOSE system, including flying samples of heat shield material on a Mercury mission, inflating a foam-filled bag with a human subject embedded inside, and test-dropping dummies in MOOSE foam shields short distances. U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger's historic freefall from a balloon at 103,000 feet (31,395 meters) in August 1960 also helped demonstrate the feasibility of such extreme parachuting. However, the MOOSE system was nonetheless always intended as an extreme emergency measure when no other option for returning an astronaut to Earth existed; falling from orbit protected by nothing more than a spacesuit and a bag of foam was unlikely to ever become a particularly safe—or enticing—maneuver.
Neither NASA nor the U.S. Air Force expressed an interest in the MOOSE system, and so by the end of the 1960s, the program was quietly shelved.
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