Rising roughly 7,000 feet higher than his targeted 120,000 feet, watch Felix Baumgartner shatter the records for highest crewed balloon ascent then, preposterously, take the short cut back to Earth.
This video begins well into his capsule egress checklist, which incidentally, was called out by the man who set the prior record in 1960, Joe Kittinger, and shows his exit and dramatic tumbling footage of a man free falling from the edge of space while breaking the speed of sound.
Baumgartner was in freefall for nearly four and one-half minutes before opening his chute at around 6,000 feet, and steering to a safe spot in the New Mexico desert.
Red Bull Stratos' epic leap advanced the state of the art for space suits - human exposure at the altitudes Baumgartner reached would flash boil all bodily fluids - as well as escape systems' design that will be useful to other explorers.
It also transfixed an estimated eight million pairs of eyeballs during the live-streamed event yesterday afternoon, a number I'm pretty certain pleased the sponsor of this historic event.
Waye