Felix Baumgartner (b. 1969)
Filed under the name Felix · May 27, 2026
Felix Baumgartner set a world record jumping in a supersonic freefall from the stratosphere back in 2012, which is about as far outside my comfort zone as a person can get — thirty-four years on a mill floor taught me plenty about risk, molten steel and heavy machinery and all, but nothing about jumping out of a capsule at the edge of space on purpose. I've watched robots and automation hollow out my hometown over the years and I'm generally wary of anything sold to me as pure engineering triumph, but I'll give credit where it's due: that jump took serious engineering and even more nerve to actually go through with once the door opened. My grandkids showed me the footage on a phone a while back and even I had to admit it's something else to watch. Takes a particular kind of person to trust that much preparation with his own life on the line. I've done plenty of dangerous work in my time, but that's a different animal entirely, and I respect it for what it was.