Was it all just a very well controlled PR stunt.
I like everyone else in the world, smiled in disbelief at the awesome images of Felix Baumgartner skydiving to earth from 24 miles up on Sunday. It was a great show.
But Baumgartner's jump may have been more about smoke and mirrors than balloons and parachutes. All careful orchestrated by the Red Bull PR machine.
There were clues of a hoax, the mission control based at Roswell, made famous by the faked alien autopsy. The map clearly marked Area 51 on the wall, the site associated with UFO sightings. And the enormous number of people monitoring a balloon mission, something Richard Branson and Steve Fossett achieved with a staff of six.
The pedalled pseudo-science, lurid stories of what would happen if things went wrong with Baumgartner's suit, "His blood will vaporise instantly if the suit rips!" But it didn't. Of course it didn't, and it never would have. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent designing, testing, building in triple-engineered safeguards and re-checking things time and again to make sure that it would not rip. This wasn’t something cobbled together in a garden shed. The previous holder of the skydive height record, Captain Joe Kittinger of the US Air Force, jumped from 108,000 feet (compared to Baumgartner's 128,000 feet) in 1960 in a suit that was literally held together with duct tape. That suit could have ripped; Baumgartner's very unlikely.
Ever since Chuck Yeager broke the technical and psychological barrier of surpassing the speed of sound over 60 years ago, there has been little mystery about doing so, even commercial airline passengers used to do so regularly on Concorde. The very words "sonic boom" suggest some sort of explosion to be endured at the magical speed; but that does not happen. An object travelling faster than sound is merely one going very fast indeed, the boom is just an effective doubling of the object’s normal sound level when the sound waves are compressed and merge. It can be noisy, for sure, but it is not dangerous.
The assertion that Baumgartner’s spin could have been dangerous, even catastrophic. Again, we only have to look at Kittinger's jump over half a century ago to show that’s just melodrama, during his first edge-of-the-atmosphere jump he leapt from 76,400 feet, went into a spin, fell unconscious... and was saved by an automatic-release mechanism fitted to his parachute. You can be pretty sure that if they had one of those in 1959 they probably had two or three last Sunday.
When you see a story like Baumgartner's go viral and jump all round the world, all at once, it means one thing: a colossal public relations effort behind the scenes. Red Bull engineering the greatest marketing coup in years.