Felix Baumgartner made history on 14 October 2012 by jumping off a balloon more than 39km up in the stratosphere.
This is a CBS report recorded after his big achievement. It may be a bit difficult for students at an intermediate level, but the questions below will give them a good opportunity to revise numbers and focus their attention while listening and trying to get the main ideas in the interview.
Self-study activity:
Watch the CBS video and answer the questions.
1 How many times has the jump been watched on YouTube?
2 How long did it take him to go up into the sky in a balloon?
3 How long would it take him to die if something went wrong?
4 How old is Felix?
5 How long did Felix have to find a solution when problems started?
6 How fast was he going?
7 When had the old record been set?
8 What was the main problem Felix had to overcome?
9 How long did he have to spend in his suit?
10 Who helped him to overcome his fear?
11 What’s the second problem that they mention?
You can check the answers by reading the transcript below.
Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking space jump has now been watched more than 52m times on YouTube. Well on Sunday the Austrian native became the first skydriver, skydiver I should say, to break the speed of sound. Now only on CBS this morning he tells Ben Tracey what it felt like and why he did it.
[Landing on the parking lot everything has to go real quick.]
Felix Baumgartner has jumped off the tallest buildings in the world, raced an airplane through the sky, and crossed the English Channel with a wing strapped on his back.
[There’s the release!]
But this past Sunday as he spent two and a half hours riding a 55 story balloon 24 miles into the sky, he admits his nickname ‘Fearless Felix’ did not fit.
People referred to you as fearless Felix. I imagine fear has to creep in at some point.
You would not be human if you would not have fear. And up there, if something goes wrong, you're dead in 15 seconds.
[There’s a world up there…]
When the capsule door opened, 43-year-old Baumgartner was on the biggest high of his life, 128,000 feet in the air. In Los Angeles Thursday, Baumgartner took us through a replay of his jump.
That door opens up. What does it look like, what does it sound like?
It is overwhelming. I mean, that view, and also the fact that when you're standing there, there's not a single person on the whole planet who have experienced this moment. It's unique.
He uttered four more words: "I'm going home now," and jumped into the stratosphere.
So you jump off and everything looks great and then all of a sudden you start to tumble, right there. What does it feel like?
It starts ramping up, really violent, and then I knew, 'OK, now I have to come up with something,’ and I had to find a solution, and I only had 40 seconds because then it's all over.
All over because he'd hit thicker air and that would slow him down and prevent him from reaching the speed of sound. But instead, he regained control, free falling for four minutes and 20 seconds, hitting Mach 1.24, 834 miles per hour.
You get to the point where you’re travelling at the speed of sound, but you’re also in this suit. So physically do you have a sense of how fast you’re going?
In the beginning because the air is so thin, you don't have that noise, so you have almost no sensation of speed. You know you're fast, but you don't feel it.
They were feeling it in Mission Control where 84-year-old Joe Kittinger watched Baumgartner break the height and speed records he set back in 1960.
This three-hour spectacle took five years of planning. It was not a fear of heights that Felix had to overcome, but rather claustrophobia.
The only way to go up to the altitude is you have to use a pressure suit, otherwise you're gonna die. And just the thought of spending seven hours in the suit, which is pretty much a whole day, starts freaking me out. It's not supersonic speed, it's not the height that was the problem. It was the suit. Nobody anticipated that.
A psychiatrist helped him deal with that. But there was another adjustment: his attitude.
At one point you had a reputation as a bit of a hot head, how have you changed?
Well, I think I’ve changed a lot. I think you're changing with age, become more quiet, maybe a little bit smarter. You have to become a little bit more humble.
Even if you create the sonic boom heard round the world.
It’s the only supersonic boom created from the human person that exists in the whole world.
And what does it mean to you to know you’re a boom?
It means a lot.
Because jumping from the heavens it’s not without being without fear, it’s about diving right into it.
