This is how Felix Baumgartner jumped: almost 40 kilometers high, breaking the sound barrier and breaking three world records

On October 14, 2012, at the age of 43, Felix Baumgartner would be immortalized in history books as the first supersonic man . In a leap from the stratosphere that paralyzed the world, the Austrian extreme athlete became the first man to break the sound barrier without mechanical assistance... and live to tell the tale.

As part of a campaign called Red Bull Stratos, Baumgartner ascended inside a capsule attached to a huge helium balloon, just 0.002 centimeters thick (ten times thinner than conventional plastic bags), to an altitude of 39 kilometers , thus breaking his first world record for the day. A mere trifle.

After a two-and-a-half-hour journey from the stratosphere, the jumper looked down at the Earth below him and wished his companions "could see what I'm seeing." The 360-degree camera in his suit captured our impassive planet and the infinite depths of space, and despite experiencing it firsthand, Felix jumped.

With the second record, that of the jump into the void from a greater height, in his pocket, he dedicated himself to that journey propelled only by the Earth's gravity, which lasted four minutes and 20 seconds , and in which he broke, for the first time in history, the sound barrier without mechanical assistance (he reached 1,357.64 kilometers per hour ).

Jumping head first to avoid loss of consciousness or, in the worst case, a brain hemorrhage, Baumgartner then surpassed the record of Joe Kittinger , an American (who died in 2022 at the age of 94) who in 1960 jumped into the void from 31,333 meters when he belonged to the United States Air Force.

When he touched down, after deploying his parachute, of course, Baumgartner fell to his knees, raising two victorious fists to the sky he had conquered, before joining his family in a heartfelt embrace. After his tragic death in 2025, in a paragliding accident, the supersonic man's stratospheric leap remains immortalized as his legacy.