I think his body was falling at the time.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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The "sound barrier" is not a physical barrier, like a wall. You wouldn't come to a complete stop. It's just the point at which you're moving so fast that the air no longer has time to move out of the way, and so it behaves differently.
It would be really rough on your body, to be sure, but not as bad as hitting a magic wall that makes you come to a complete stop.
Please site your Magic Wall sources. I think they are outdated. With current magic wall safety technology I think he would safely survive the stop.
Perhaps not a complete stop but numerous aircraft were destroyed as they tried to break the speed of sound. The air building up in front of you is excess pressure that is loud enough to shake windows on the ground. We shouldn’t discount the force supplied by air. It is a pressure wave from bombs, not fire, that causes explosive damage.
Oh, yeah, the forces are very intense. But it isn't at all the same as coming to a complete stop - closer to the water hammer effect if anything (since the air becomes incompressable at those speeds). There's also a lot of turbulence, vibration, and heat from the drastically increased air resistance.
Correct. No complete stop.
I watched the excerpts of his video but never really explained why the turning happened for a while then stopped?
How would you control your spin if there's no air to push against? The ionosphere is so thin, it may as well be hard vacuum. until you made it to some place the air is thick enough to help control your rotation, once you start spinning, you can't stop.
But why in the first place did he start spinning? The people they talked to were awaiting it and were suprised it didn't come thru sooner.
Yeah, we're not a regular, balanced geometric shape. Without a tether or something to help stabilize against, every marginal push or pull (like gravity, or the marginal friction of the ionosphere) will tend to send us tumbling.
He jumped from about 128,000ft / 39,000 m. While an extreme altitude, it is very much inside the stratosphere. The prevailing accepted boundary of space is the Karman line which starts at 328,000 ft / 100,000 m and is much, much higher.
You should watch the video. He talks about what it was like.
The "sound barrier" is not a physical barrier.
It would be like if a car was going 40mph and accelerated until it "hit" 60mph. Or, if they keep going and they "break the speed limit" nothing actually gets broken. It's just a phrase that we use to mean "the speed exceeds this amount"
That would kill someone. Twice. I guarantee he did not go 150 -> 0 -> 250.
Felix Baumgartner, fyi.
Wow, he died last year.
The "sound barrier" is a term chosen for dramatic flair to describe the increase in air resistance as velocity approaches the speed of sound in that air.
The speed of sound in air is definitionally the maximum speed a which a compression wave can propagate through that air. As you move forward at faster and faster speeds, the air in front of you has less time to move out of your way as you approach the speed it can compress. That increase in resistance constitutes the "barrier". Exceeding the speed of sound thus results in that "barrier" transitioning into a conical shock wave propagating outward from the object traveling at speed. (All of that is rather simplified.)
So, no. From Felix's perspective, he experienced a significant increase in air resistance as his speed increased, transirioning to a relatively consistent degree of resistance with a conical shockwave which he may or may not have been able to perceive from the point of view of being its origin as he accelerated beyond Mach 1.
He would likely have needed to consult instruments to know he had reached that kind of speed.
Just look at his latest flight.