Bad weather scuttles supersonic jump from the edge of space
At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Felix Baumgartner, an extreme skydiver from Austria, was scheduled to jump out of a balloon hovering 23 miles over the New Mexico desert, and plummet toward earth at hundreds of miles an hour 鈥� temporarily exceeding the speed of sound.听It was a feat "the greatest action sports exploit yet."
But according to Red Bull, which is sponsoring the so-called "Stratos" project, the jump has been delayed.听
"We're on hold, waiting," Sarah Anderson, a spokeswoman for Red Bull, Reuters in an e-mail. (In an earlier message on the Stratos blog, Red Bull reps said "the wind must be calm enough to allow a safe launch of the 550-ft-tall balloon.") According to Reuters, the Stratos team is hoping that weather will have calmed by 1:30 p.m. EST, allowing the space suit-clad Baumgartner and the balloon to take to the skies.听
This is not the first delay for Stratos. On Friday, the launch of the balloon was delayed by a cold front, which would have brought wind and rain, Space.com .听
In July, during a test run, Baumgartner leapt from a height of more than 96,000 feet (18 miles), and temporarily reached a speed of 536 miles-per-hour. It took Baumgartner approximately 10 minutes to reach the ground from that altitude.听"It was a rough couple of days and an exhausting endeavor," Baumgartner at the time. "I am now really excited. It has always been a dream of mine. Only one more step to go."
Baumgartner is attempting to break the record set by聽US military pilot , who jumped from 102,800 feet聽back in 1960.
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