40 May/June 2022COURTESYRED^ BULLSpace
10
// BY JENNIFER LEM A N //So You Want
to Skydive
From Space?
Endless threats:
A loss of pressure
in a space diver’s
suit could result
in decompression
sickness.I
N 2014, ALAN EUSTACE, THEN THE SENIOR
vice president of knowledge at Google,
dropped from a hot-air balloon f loating
135,899 feet above Earth’s surface. During the
four minute and 27 second plummet, the tech
mogul reached speeds of over 800 miles per
hour and shattered Red Bull stuntman Felix
Baumgartner’s previous skydiving record, estab-
lished just two years earlier.
Since U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger’s
famous free-fall from 102,800 feet above Earth’s
surface in 1960, adrenaline junkies have sought
higher and higher altitudes from which to jump,
inching ever closer to the Kármán line, or the
boundary between our atmosphere and space. So
far, neither Eustace, Baumgartner, nor anyone else
who has careened down from the heavens has made
it anywhere near the boundary, which lies roughly
62 miles above Earth’s surface, or 327,360 feet. So
what would it actually take to skydive from space?THE EDGE OF SPACE
First, you have to get there. In the past, these
high-altitude skydivers have used specialized hot
air balloons to lift them into the stratosphere, the
second layer of Earth’s atmosphere. But balloons
can only go so high (roughly 135,000 feet) before
the air becomes too thin for them to maintain their
altitude. Reaching greater heights requires rock-
et-powered f light—a challenging feat because the
diver’s bailout would need to be timed for when the
spacecraft reaches its apogee, the point in its orbit
when it is farthest from Earth.A SPECIALIZED SUIT
The pressurized spacesuits astronauts wear act
as personal spaceships, with ever y thing the astro-
naut needs to survive in the event of an emergency.
A space diver’s suit “would have to be a very, very
rugged spacesuit,” says Erik Seedhouse, Ph.D., an
assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
For starters, it would likely require its own
propulsion capability, Seedhouse says, in order
to properly orient the diver so they don’t begin to