A camera mounted on supersonic parachutist Felix Baumgartner's helmet shows what happened when, tens of thousands of feet above the earth, he went into an uncontrolled spin.
Baumgartner later related that he knew he was in trouble. The spinning could have pushed too much blood into his cranium, causing a blackout or possibly rupturing vessels in the brain. He considered deploying his drogue chute to stabilize but he knew that if he did, the attempt for a supersonic record would be gone forever.
With only seconds to decide, Baumgartner got his fall sorted out, probably aided by entering denser air that enabled greater control from his arms and legs. He did keep accelerating, though, and went on to hit Mach 1.24 before landing safely.
A world without nuclear weapons - what would it look like?
From Pope Leo this week, according to the National Catholic Reporter : " Pope Leo quotes Bob Dylan song in book foreword calling for n...
-
I've just returned from three days of the Bishop's Convocation of the Tennessee and Memphis Conferences of the United Methodist Chur... -
The UMC's greatest membership number came in 1968, when The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren merged to create The Un...
-
In the wake of federal Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling that overturned California's Proposition 8 , that defined marriage solely as th...
