Space Dive

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Sunday 14th October.

Mission control. We're

in perfect conditions for launch.

The world is watching...

To expedite the process...

..as a man in a space suit

flies a balloon to 128,000 feet.

We are away. Felix is away.

At the edge of space,

he leaves the capsule,

stands on a tiny step...

..and jumps.

He becomes the first person to fall

faster than the speed of sound.

But although the world watched,

it didn't see the whole story.

How seconds earlier, as he fell,

Felix Baumgartner lost control

and came close to disaster.

What is he doing?

He's spinning, isn't he?

How on the way up, he was nearly

forced to call off the whole jump.

We have an emergency here.

We could very well be cutting him

down any minute.

And how four years of struggles

and setbacks

pushed the mission

to the brink of collapse.

Two flights, two mission aborts -

stop selling me excuses.

What's going on?

He had the opportunity

to get trained properly.

He never took advantage of it.

Sometimes feels like

it's just too much.

This is the untold story

of how a team of scientists

and sky-divers...

Rock and roll!

..took a giant leap...

..and stunned the world.

I had this dream

when I was a little kid.

And I'm still having it

two or three times a month.

Always the same dream, you know,

I'm just walking out here

on the street,

I run for a couple of feet,

then I take off.

It was always a show-off flight

to my friends,

cos they don't believe it.

I'm always telling them,

"OK, wait until you see this."

You can do backflips, front flips,

you can do spins,

you can do whatever you want.

Then coming back after a couple

of minutes and telling them,

"See, I told you I can fly."

Felix Baumgartner

is gripped by an obsession.

He wants to fly.

Higher, further, faster

than any human has ever dared.

But to realise that dream,

he needs to break a record

that has stood

for more than fifty years.

In 1960, test pilot Joe Kittinger

volunteered for a mission

to test survival at the edge

of the Earth's atmosphere.

Protected by just a pressure suit,

he flew a balloon

beyond 100,000 feet.

Not only did he survive the flight,

at the edge of space,

he did something extraordinary.

Joe fell 19 miles back to earth.

His feat was so dangerous

and technically difficult

that it has never been matched.

Before Felix can

take on HIS near-space mission,

he needs to be trained.

Only one man has the skills

and experience for the job.

Retired Colonel...Joe Kittinger.

I think the first week after my jump

I got a phone call from a guy

wanting to beat my record.

And monthly since then, for 50 years

I've been getting calls.

99% of them

have no idea of the challenge.

Joe has come out of retirement

to help Felix break his record

and become the first person

to freefall faster

than the speed of sound.

It's kind of a weird thought

when you look at all these

supersonic planes.

And when I do my jump,

I'm travelling at the same speed.

Well, nobody's ever done it.

I can't estimate, but it's going to

be the dynamics, aeronautics,

CG changes, turbulence.

Felix really doesn't

have the experience

and the background that I had.

But he'll be going five miles higher

than what I jumped from

so I've got to be extra intense

at looking at how he's doing.

When I go supersonic speed,

I almost become an aeroplane.

You're a bomb.

A bomb?

You're a bomb.

I want to be an aeroplane,

not a bomb!

You're a bomb that can manoeuvre.

But I was born to fly.

That's right, you were born to fly.

And you'd better fly too!

Felix has already turned his

obsession with flying into a career.

He is a professional BASE jumper.

He's set records for the highest

jump from a building...

..and the lowest.

But for this mission,

Felix needs to jump from 20 miles

higher than he has ever been before.

Just getting there

requires a multi-million dollar

space programme.

Screw it in, screw it in.

It's still got to go this way.

A team of 20 engineers

and scientists

is working on the technology to fly

Felix beyond the stratosphere.

We're trying to take a human being

up into space

and have him come back safely.

I've got a diagram here.

I call it a plumbing diagram -

we're space plumbers.

All the way over.

The man in charge is Art Thompson.

Oh, my God!

This is going to be big, isn't it?!

Art has worked on rocket planes

for NASA

and stealth bombers

for the US military.

But for this mission, he's working

for an Austrian drinks company.

You really got to kind of hand it

to them that they took on

this commitment to do, in essence,

a privately funded space programme.

But Red Bull's budget

of 3.5 million pounds

comes with something

these engineers aren't used to -

a 12-month deadline.

We've got schedules to make!

We've got big schedules to make!

Yeah!

Despite the lack of time, Art's

ideas for the project are ambitious.

It starts out really simple

as a napkin sketch in the middle

of the night

and eventually

that ends up becoming more.

It's a technical beast

that keeps growing.

Just like Joe's day,

the only way up for Felix

is via the oldest aircraft of all -

a balloon.

It's almost like the space programme

going full circle again.

It started with the balloon,

we've come back to the balloon.

But this is no ordinary balloon.

At nearly 30 million cubic feet,

it's the biggest ever used

for a manned flight.

One tenth as thick

as a polythene bag

but strong enough to carry the space

capsule that Art is building.

At launch,

it will be filled with helium

until it's taller

than a fifty-storey building.

It's amazing that this

piece of plastic, that is

no thicker than a dry cleaner bag,

is going to hold up all this weight.

At around 63,000 feet, it will

pass through the Armstrong line.

Beyond this point,

the lack of pressure

would be deadly without protection.

As it rises, the gas will expand

until the balloon

is the width of a football field.

It will take three hours to carry

Felix 24 miles above the earth.

Getting him there is hard enough.

Keeping him alive is even harder.

We're talking about the medical

and physiological considerations

of an extreme altitude jump.

Felix and Joe

meet the project's medical team.

We have to go through the what-if's

to understand what our choices are.

It includes a former astronaut

and the world's leading expert

on altitude sickness.

This is what happens in the body.

The CO2,

partial pressure of oxygen...

The doctors have identified a series

of high-altitude dangers.

First, a life-threatening condition

called hypoxia.

Definition of hypoxia.

It's a deficiency of oxygen.

These are the symptoms.

You may get impaired efficiency,

drowsiness, poor judgement,

visual blurring, extreme fatigue,

you're not really functional

at that point.

But there's a bigger threat -

the lack of atmospheric pressure

above the Armstrong line.

Ebulism. Definition -

tissue vaporization. It's dramatic.

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