I would guess he will have a pre chute to create drag and slow him down a bit before he pulls his main chute.... but I dunno and have zero experience in parachuting

Edit: Just found this



Looks like the air resistance slows him as he actually get's back toward "human elevations"

Yeah, you're wrong. Migratory birds will fly in the 20,000-30,000 feet range. There are some that fly over the Himalayas. I'm guessing he's not doing the fall somewhere where this would be a problem though.

Here is the official page for the Stratos Jump if anyone is interested in it.

http://www.redbullstratos.com/

I'm not a skydiver but I always have a little pre chute come out before the main chute.

I got 5:1 that he dies in the attempt somehow, sucker bet on my part but worth it for the lols

I'd be more concerned about hitting a bird with the chute deployed than hitting one before. Seems like it could somehow mess with the only thing that is keeping you from falling to your death.

Some vultures soar well over a mile above the ground, too. But afaik all such species are African.

Anyway, I'm trying to think of something impressive about this and not coming up with much. He has a million dollars worth of equipment and a huge team making sure he won't fail except by some super-longshot roll of the dice, and he's not doing anything qualitatively different from something that was done half a century ago. Big ****ing deal.

Whenever he gets in a fix, he reaches into his bag of tricks imo.

Not only did he decide to go for it, but he decided not to even tell mission control about it because they may have called off the jump.

This is awesome. Will definitely be watching, whenever it is.

Besides the fact that he will be jumping out of something higher up than 99.999999% of people will ever go.... safety, dollars, whatever..... this guy has some serious balls.

This seems cool but it would be even better if he rode a rocket pack up to the necessary elevation, or just rode an actual rocket booster (you'd have to shut it off remotely). All while on weed. That would be awesome and hilarious and the weed part opens the door to all kinds of new records.

So my dad says that, for when nature calls, he "uses the same system the astronauts use", which I understand to be some form of pissing/****ting into a tube attached to the suite. I'm sure there is more information about how this works online, but certain things I just don't really need to know.

This. Apart from migration, most birds don't fly over 500 ft., in which case I would guess that the risks of this jump aren't much different from any other jump (in which case bird strike can damage your canopy). I think the highest observed migratory flock was at 29,000 ft.

Nothing will ever be as cool as Kittinger stepping off that gondola just walking out into space.