Red Bulletin

Red Bull Stratos

Felix Baumgartner (left) wants to take his pressurised balloon gondola to 36km, the highest balloon flight ever, and then leap back to Earth. No one has ever leapt from such a height before. No parachute jump will have ever lasted so long. No man has ever previously broken the sound barrier in free fall.

Red Bull Stratos is following in the footsteps of Project Excelsior, which saw Colonel Joe Kittinger (left) of the US Air Force jump from 31km on August 16, 1960. Kittinger is now Baumgartner’s mentor, the only man alive who can offer advice on a mission where the slightest error in proceedure could prove fatal.

Red Bull Stratos is taking all its participants way beyond their comfort zones. Since the project was announced two years ago, the team has had to contend with more challenges than it could ever have foreseen. For a short time, the project appeared to be on the point of collapse.

But now Red Bull Stratos is about to get off the ground. The Red Bulletin will follow Baumgartner and his team until his record-breaking jump. This month, Part One of our story begins with a disarming interview with Baumgartner.



Interview with Felix Baumgartner
Before ascending into the stratosphere and free falling back to Earth in spectacular, record-breaking fashion, the Austrian BASE-jumper, 42, had to face his demons. At the high point of his life thus far, he hit an all-time low.

The Red Bulletin: All went quiet on Red Bull Stratos for nine months. What was going on behind the scenes?
Felix Baumgartner: Let’s go back to the time before the project was stopped because of a lawsuit. In December 2010, we carried out the last major tests with the space suit and it was clear to me that I had a problem – one I never thought I’d have – with my psyche. I had trouble putting on the space suit and it got worse and worse. I could barely stand a couple of minutes in it.

Could you describe the symptoms?
The idea was that the suit should feel like a second skin, but it’ll never be like that. your movements and your perceptions are restricted. as soon as the visor closes there’s this nightmarish silence and loneliness – the suit signifies imprisonment. We hadn’t originally conceived of a test that confined me in the suit for five hours – that’s how long the entire mission should take – with the visor closed. after all my past exploits, all the extreme things I’ve done in my career, no one would have ever guessed that simply wearing a space suit would threaten the mission, me included. In the end, it turned into panic attacks.

You’re exaggerating...
Not at all. When it came to the crucial pressure test at -60°C, under real conditions with pressure and altitude simulated, and surrounded by cameras, airforce personnel and scientists, I realized just I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see a way around this problem. I’d easily mastered what seemed to be huge obstacles, like free fall in a pressure suit, but now my own head was letting me down. Instead of driving to Brooks [the Brooks academy of Science and engineering in San antonio, texas] to go testing, I drove to the airport and hightailed it out of America. I wept on the phone. It was the worst moment of my life. to that point I’d always known how to solve all my own problems. This time, in front of everyone, I’d found my limit.

Clearly, you’ve since pushed it higher.
We tried several things in training because from a medical standpoint a high basic fitness would also improve my stress resistance. But really, I mean... for 20 years I’ve done the most extreme BASE jumps, I’ve flown over the English Channel [in a wing suit], I’ve shown my stress resistance without hours of exercise bike sessions. the problem had to be solved another way.

And how was that?
Through Mike Gervais, a renowned American psychologist, who stripped me down and gave me a ‘toolbox’ of psychological tools, that allowed me to learn how to master the situation. Within two weeks, he coached me from 30 minutes of staying in the suit to ‘I don’t care how long I wear this thing!’ this was my greatest victory to date: I’d found the limit that I’d been looking for my whole career. No Channel flight, no cave, no Jesus statue achieved what that suit did down here at ground level. And with mike I overcame this hurdle and – as banal as it may sound – I’m stronger than ever before.

So how did he do it?
With heavy artillery! Mike forced me to imagine a son and trying to explain to him what red Bull Stratos means to me. It was a tough journey, but I’ll do anything if it serves my purpose. When I put the helmet on I had to describe my mental state every three minutes, on a scale of one, which is totally relaxed, to 10, panic. at the same time I wore a heart rate monitor. The interesting thing about this was that my heart rate remained totally constant when I was between three and eight on the scale. That was important to know. Next, we analysed my routines: I’d always lose my appetite the day before putting on the suit and this escalated into a nice little panic as we made our way out to visit our mission Director, art Thompson. Mike used to work with a martial arts guy who regularly spiraled downwards on the drive to the arena: for him, the fight was already lost before the first hit. he identified these mechanisms and gave me tools which helped me to jump off the negative thought train before it had left the station.

Such as?
People can only think one thought at a time. You can jump very quickly from one thought to another, but each moment only one thought can be processed. So when I have a bad thought, I have to mentally exit my helmet. So, for example, I’ll spell words backwards. Nothing mysterious, just simple tools that will actually help you your whole life long. Mike also forced me to think things through to the end: what happens when someone shackles me into my suit and I freak out? I thought I would lash out, fall into a screaming fit and end up suffering a heart attack. Wrong: when your ‘alarm reservoir’ is exhausted, you become quieter and capable of thinking logically again. So knowing the storm will pass and that things get better gives me confidence and allows me to relax a little.

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