Speaking of Star Trek movies, hardcore fans may recall there was a scene planned for the seventh one, Generations, in which Captain Kirk tries to relieve the boredom of his retirement years by indulging in the 23rd Century’s version of extreme sports, “orbital skydiving.” That is, he jumps out of an orbiting spacecraft and free-falls back into the atmosphere until he’s low enough to open a parachute. The scene didn’t make it into the finished film, although it appears in the novelization and comic-book adaptation; a rough version of it is available on YouTube, if you’re curious. Or masochistic. Personally, I’m glad it got cut. Not that Generations was a very good film anyway, but having that scene right in the opening moments would’ve been a disaster. The later Trek films already suffered from an excess of silliness, and this particular idea was so painfully ridiculous that audiences would’ve been in full-on MST3K mode before the credits even started rolling. Even within a framework that allows teleportation and giant starships that literally bend the fabric of spacetime, skydiving from outer space is over-the-top implausible.
Or so I’ve always thought.
In one of those really weird welcome-to-the-future moments, I’ve learned that two competing daredevils aim sometime this fall to do something very similar to what I thought even James T. Kirk could not believably do: skydive from the very edge of space back to Earth. One of them is an Austrian named Felix Baumgartner, who is fully sponsored by Red Bull and widely believed to have the best chance of succeeding; the other is a Frenchman called Michel Fournier, who is funding his own adventure and has been trying to accomplish this feat since the 1980s. Both men have similar plans: to ascend to 120,000 feet in a gigantic balloon, clad in a pressure suit, and then leap out and plummet back down to 3,000 feet before deploying a specially designed parachute. The total jump will last about 10 minutes. And here’s the really wild part: the jumpers expect to exceed 700 mph during their fall. That’s the speed of sound, if you don’t know this aeronautical stuff. No one knows what might happen to a human body breaking the sound barrier without an airplane or spacecraft around them. Possibly nothing… or it’s equally possible these guys could turn themselves into strawberry jam. Either way… a supersonic human is pretty mind-boggling.
No date has been announced for either attempt. I’ll be following this story, though…
