Bad weather scuttles supersonic jump from the edge of space
(Read article summary)Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian skydiver, has delayed his Red Bull Stratos jump until later this afternoon. Baumgartner plans to leap from a balloon stationed 23 feet above the New Mexico desert.
At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Felix Baumgartner, an extreme skydiver from Austria, was scheduled to jump out of a balloon hovering 23 miles over the New Mexico desert, and plummet toward earth at hundreds of miles an hour – temporarily exceeding the speed of sound. It was a feat dubbed "the greatest action sports exploit yet."
But according to Red Bull, which is sponsoring the so-called "Stratos" project, the jump has been delayed.
"We're on hold, waiting," Sarah Anderson, a spokeswoman for Red Bull, told Reuters in an e-mail. (In an earlier message on the Stratos blog, Red Bull reps said "the wind must be calm enough to allow a safe launch of the 550-ft-tall balloon.") According to Reuters, the Stratos team is hoping that weather will have calmed by 1:30 p.m. EST, allowing the space suit-clad Baumgartner and the balloon to take to the skies.
