Dive out of Space, for the Next Level of Adrenal Thrill

I like the beauty of life – but some prefer an intimate relationship between life and death. They like extreme sports, the adrenal thrill of challenging limits and cheating death, jumping of cliffs and planes.
Heart’s plummeting, while you sit stationed at sixty miles off the ground in a small rocket – and a command calls you to jump off the craft, you undo your harness and out you go, jumping from 120,000 feet in a specially designed space suit at scorching speeds of over 2500 mph, descending Earthwards. The speeds fall to about 120mph, to terminal velocity when around the outer atmosphere and at 3000 feet, a typical parachute opens – that leads you down safely only for you to hear a big thud far-off - that’s probably your rocket in a pile of twisted metal.

That’s Space Diving for you - the latest venture to flaunt with the extreme emotions.

Did you ever think humans could be crafted into living meteorites, returning alive from the orbit – all perhaps wished this was a reality when the landing of Atlantis was delayed by a couple of days, last week – or when the space shuttle Colombia broke, killing all crewmembers in mid space.

It may be a hallucination for you and me but for two space industry veterans — Rick Tumlinson and Jonathan Clark – it is a veracity that the duo wishes to bestow upon us by 2009 — a technology not only as a sport but also a feasible escape route for the astronauts in the event of a mishap.

Jonathan Clark the mentor of the design carries a very personal and emotional interest – he is the husband of Laurel Clark, one of the crewmembers in the Columbia space shuttle.

Ya, diving from 120,000 feet may be thrilling and wouldn’t require anything more than what the conventional balloon divers did, who attempted beyond 100,000 feet – an oxygen supply to breathe, a drogue chute to prevent spins and tumbles, a main chute to land at survivable speeds, and a pressure suit. Though, certain flaws accompany – if the human body is exposed - a worse fate wouldn’t follow long, with the water in the blood turning into gas in the low pressure - and there you’re, gone!

The Duo holds high ambitions of designing a suit for a dive of sixty miles soon with the eventual objective of engineering endurable dives from and beyond the incredible 150 miles from the surface.

The concept is a bliss – none would mind the cost for being up there. It could have saved many a lives in space in the past, perhaps it will in future, once it’s up there.

[Source: Popsci]