Space Jump

There was a human being falling from space.

At speeds of live human being has fallen for...

faster than the speed of a bullet.

-Touchdown. -Holy . He has done it.

The global effect of how far it reached took me by surprise.

Incredible.

That was viewed by half the world's population.

It seemed like one of these once in a lifetime opportunities.

You don't want to miss.

Pass the line, over.

It was one of those major events.

That's unreal.

Where are the TV will turn around,

the whole world comes together and watches

that to me, is what Stratos was.

Felix Baumgartner here...

They crushed all the records of having people

watch simultaneously online.

It had the chance that it could take down all of YouTube.

Because of the concentration

of the bandwidth on one singular stream,

and it became a really meaningful moment in livestreaming history.

This was compelling for a whole generation in their teens

and in their twenties, because that, too,

is going to watch on those platforms.

We heard that from our teenagers.

Thank you. You gave us our moon landing.

This was history in the making.

Who wants to miss a second of that?

It makes me feel really good to sit in this capsule after so many years,

and the only thing that I have to do right now

is to talk about what we have accomplished, 10 years ago,

makes it a lot easier.

So my job was sports partnerships manager,

to basically be the interface for YouTube to connect with Red Bull.

In 2012, the Internet was very different than today,

and I think YouTube had a reputation

for mostly being dogs on skateboards and cat videos.

Livestreaming was definitely not normal.

We've done a few live things on the YouTube platform.

prior to the 2012 Stratos Jump.

The most meaningful metric that we were looking at

was how many concurrent viewers were watching this event.

That's how many people were watching at the same point in time.

We had the Olympic Games from London,

I think it was probably a hundred meters around Usain Bolt,

was about 600,000 live concurrence.

We'd also done a few presidential debates,

probably say numbers 300,000 to 400,000 Live concurrence.

but nothing massive that really tested the system.

So one of my colleagues, Tim Cats,

came to me one day with this idea that Red Bull wanted to do,

eh, this Stratos Jump.

His reaction was a little bit,

"Are you crazy to expose us to this kind of risk."

You know, we could see Felix die on screen.

Not to mention a pretty incredible technical challenge

of how do you even get video cameras 23 miles up in the air to film this.

This is not just a capsule that protects me inside the capsule.

It's also a flying TV studio, because what we wanted to do is,

to strap people into that seat on the edge of space

and let them experience what I experience.

All right, stand up on the exterior step.

But this wasn't just being streamed on the Internet.

I mean, we had media partners worldwide.

which supported my training.

I think 77 TV channels

around the world, broadcasted my jump life,

and millions of people watched it on television.

I don't think anyone had ever done this before.

So it was really a first ever.

Back then I was an engineer,

really soldering all the cables underneath the dashboard

and putting everything into the capsule.

Here we have four cameras.

There's a lot more cameras on top

because we want to capture this and show it to the world.

We could start/stop recordings. We could assign those video feeds

to the different downlink than do crazy things.

So basically one decade ago,

we already realized the remote production,

which is nowadays the password in the broadcast industry.

Those cameras are producing a lot of heat,

and because it's almost a vacuum up there,

there's no air that takes the heat away.

So we had to develop a cooling system,

to make sure the cameras, not overheating,

If I look at the capsule, it allows me to go to space.

It's giving me the opportunity.

It's the only chance to reach my goal.

That's going all the way up to the stratosphere

and skied off back to Earth at supersonic speed.

I really appreciated the fact that we have a capsule

that protects my life all the way up.

Because you know the suit, it's the last complicated system.

If the suit malfunctions, you're going to die.

So to have a double life support system capsule ensued,

cannot get better than that.

But on the other hand, it's a very heavy ship

that also requires much speaker balloon

to get me up to jump altitude.

We thought about doing it in a rocket plane.

But how do you get out?

Then we decided after a couple months,

let's do it the classic way.

Sitting in the capsule, strapped to a balloon,

going all the way up to stratosphere,

It's a piece of plastic pretty much.

33 times a soccer field,

two times as high as the Saturn five rocket

that they used for going to the moon.

It's not the whole balloon in this box,

Of course, it's just part of it.

Here you go. The unsung hero.

I mean, just keep in mind.

This has been in space, a part of history.

This is what everyone has seen on TV.

And now, ten years later, I am holding in my hand.

I think we should make a coat out of it.

It's very fragile, you know.

It is ten times thinner than a sandwich bag,

so it's very easy to destroy it.

So we had given the budget for weight

of 500 pounds for camera gear.

We ended up with 1,500 pounds of camera equipment.

It was a lot of gear.

This was the largest man balloon ever flown.

The balloon itself is 600 feet tall.

The parachute is another 150 feet, so it's a 70 story building.

What can I tell you about Art? Art is an extraordinary engineer.

Blessed or cursed with the heart of an artist.

He brings the two worlds together. I've never met anyone like him.

It was important for me that the program be viewed

as a scientific program and not as a promotional stunt.

The fact that Red Bull was so good,

about documenting the process and understanding

how to expose that to the public.

that was part of the phenomenon.

of having the general public globally

be part of what was really a fantastic event.

So a year after my scattered from space,

my mom gave me a drawing,

a drawing that I completely forgot about.

I did it when I was five years old.

It's me, hanging underneath the parachute.

And it looks like I'm really high because I'm right next to the sun.

You don't even think about skydiving or breaking any records

at the age of five.

But it looks like there was something in my mind,

already growing like a seed that you plant somewhere.

I do think there was some sort of premonition all value

to what he was imagining himself doing eight years ahead.

He was going to be a different human.

He was going to try things differently.

He was going to carve his own way.

I started skydiving when I was 16 years old.

It was a childhood dream.

From the very first second, when I jumped out of an airplane,

I could feel this is where I belong to.

This is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I think skydivers and base jumpers in general,

we are a little different, right?

We see things a little differently.

Things that outside people who don't do

what we do think are like, that's a big deal.

You almost died.

Running from a cliff is to me the ultimate dream.

I don't think the wider public understands risk

the way you know Felix understands it.

The definition of a daredevil

is a reckless person doing dangerous things,

and for me, Felix was never reckless.

He thinks the feats that he did, of course, they were dangerous.

He's not a risk taker. He's a risk manager.

I'm a stunt coordinator.

I think what I do with film stunts

and what Felix did with Stratos, there's a lot of crossover.

Tom Cruise, he's an actor that does literally everything himself.

It's months or years of training

to get himself to a position that he's so competent

that the risk factor goes right down

and that's what, you know, Felix did.

As a base jumper, it's a very easy relationship.

You know it, it's you, that's your parachute and your decision making.

But working on Red Bull Stratos, it's something completely new,

and now you have to be become a team player.

There's so many people on the team that you have to rely on.

I think being part of any kind of team,

especially a team where someone's life is on the line

and the whole world is watching.

It's hard to not get tense.

Now he was the center of three hundred people

who were in their own right.

World class aerospace engineers, flight test pilots, meteorologists,

you know, film production crews.

We put together what was kind of considered the Dream Team.

One name that popped up

at the very beginning was Joe Kittinger.

Former Air Force colonel who did something very similar.

He jumped from an open controller bag in the '60s.