Jumping From the Edge of Space

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Alan Eustace shocked everyone last week when he broke Felix Baumgartner's free-fall altitude record, breaking the speed of sound and falling over 25 miles in 15 minutes. That's just crazy, and it's even harder to believe when you learn that Eustace didn't use a space capsule like Baumgartner did: he went up in a small balloon that allowed him to perform his feat for a fraction of the cost.

Eustace has a day job as "senior vice president of knowledge" at Google and, at 57, he's pretty old for an extreme athlete. There were a lot of engineering innovations to mitigate the risk, but testing only gets you so far.

Eustace says he wants humans to explore the stratosphere as safely and uneventfully as we now explore the ocean. Check out the video he released to commemorate his feat:

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