Felix Baumgartner, who he is and which companies he made

So, they asked him, before the jump do you have any fear about this step towards the unknown? Felix Baumgartner sat in the hall of a London hotel with air conditioning, no matter. Questions of the genre had already repeated two, three, hundreds of times. But the fault is not always the journalists. Some things appear so unfathomable and mystical, they have to do with life and death and become difficult to understand. Baumgartner did not take back even that time. “Fear? Of course, the fear is always there. It is what prevents me from crossing the limit too much”. It was already the man who had launched himself from an aerostatic ball at 38,969.4 meters high, the man who had accomplished what was then the highest leap ever recorded, the man who had reached the speed of 1,357.64 kilometers per hour, the man who had broken the sound barrier without the help of a aircraft. “However, having been involved in extreme companies for a long time, I learned to use fear to my advantage. Fear has become my friend.” There is something dark in these men who live at the limit. They walk on the thread, hovering on the impossible. And sometimes they are dominated.

by Salzburg

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Baumgartner has gone to 56 years of age. He had an accident after launching himself in paragliding and fell into a swimming pool in Porto Sant’Elpidio, in the province of Fermo. He came to the world in 1969, in Salzburg, the year in which Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It was the season of the space race, it had entered a new era. Years in which it was enough to turn on the TV to see astronauts, imagine other worlds, other companies, things that first seemed very far away. Felix had always dreamed of flying. “When I was little, I always had this great desire to fly like a bird,” he would have told Cnn. He wanted to launch himself with the parachute and pilot the helicopters: he would make both of his dreams come true. “Air is the place where I feel at home.” He launched himself for the first time at sixteen. Then, when the time came to enter the army, he had no doubts and devoted himself to parachuting. But there was something in Felix, an attraction for the incredible that in the nineties began to make real. In 1999 he obtained height record for a building launch by jumping from the 452 meters of the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia. And in Rio de Janeiro, a few months later, he made the discussed launch by the Christ the Redeemer: reached the highest point of the statue (about 29 meters from the ground) he threw himself into the void making what he called the lowest jump base in the world. It wasn’t enough for him. “He was very exciting, but after a while he seemed to repeat myself continuously. I wanted to try something different,” he wrote in an article for Newsweek. Many paratroopers look at the sky, eager to fly higher or to beat their records. “In 2005 I was offered the idea of launching myself with the parachute by the terrestrial stratosphere. I spoke to my friend Art Thompson, a scientist and a very intelligent person, and we started organizing and putting together a small team”.

The Trifonov sheet

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Large companies are not born by chance. They are linked to the moment, but they drag themselves behind years of studies, attempts, failures, emotions, contrasts. And randomness. One day the aeronaut Ivan Trifonov approached him and put a sheet of paper in his hand. “That sheet of paper contained two images: the first was the photo of a huge ball; the second showed an astronaut in space suit”. Tritonov wanted Felix to jump from a height of 50 kilometers, falling towards the earth at a double speed compared to that of sound, standing at the bottom of a rocket. He would land in Gosau, a quiet village in the Austrian mountains. “He said he had already agreed with the mayor. He was quite absurd, so I thanked him and I didn’t contact him anymore.” Later an American businessman presented himself to Felix and proposed him a similar project. “This was also quite unrealistic, but I thought it should be a sign,” he told Der Spiegel. For the subsequent seven years Felix did not think of anything else: launching himself from the stratosphere. A madness. That had now become a project. A vision. Yes, he made unofficial companies how to launch himself from the highest skyscraper in Taipei (he was banned for life by the country) or spectacular actions such as the one from Millau’s viaduct in France, the highest bridge in the world, or the launch in the Mamet cave in Croatia. But Felix had seen something. He had looked for her up there, and in the end she found it. “People are fascinated by the world above them because it seems so unreachable.” “My mind was constantly concentrated on the Red Bull Stratos. We had three weeks of intense training and test, and then a couple of weeks in the break. But you couldn’t really enjoy those weeks in pause because you still thought about the next great task. It was a great expenditure of energy and you no longer enjoyed your life because there was a mission so big to complete”. Felix Felix began to call him Felix without fear. But it was a lie. Over the years Baumgartner has tried several times to smooth the idea that throwing himself into the void, from unimaginable heights it is easy. Still at Spiegel, in 2012, he will say: “I am not an adrenaline drug addict. It has never been a question of thrill for me. I love the challenges and I feel at home in the air, like the sailors at sea and the mountains in the mountains. Certainly adrenaline matters, but it is never in the foreground: it has always been all focused on the goals and the way to reach them”.

the 2012 company

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Baumgartner did not look for the divine, nor immortality. He had simple dreams. As a boy he climbed the trees, looked at the birds flying, studied the world, and when the trees were not enough he was on the roofs. “Because I liked sight from above. I wanted to see the world from above.” The 2012 company, which will bring its name forever, was already all there, in those simple and childish gestures. It is not a question of awareness in one’s own means, nor of audacity. When Felix climbed aboard a pressurized capsule up to just over 128,000 feet, that is 39 kilometers above the earth’s surface, a record albumper for a hot -air balloon flight, the only thing he was looking was himself was a child. One who had made it. He had suffered from claustrophobia, the studies on the suit had been exhausting, and several times the project seemed on the point of failing. “It seemed impossible to me. I was devastated.” On October 14, 2012 at 19.09 instead he launched. Baumgartner fell at a speed of about 1.25 times that of sound and managed to land healthy and Salvo, having left a spiral that could have triggered his safety parachute and frustrated his hopes of reaching the supersonic speed. “Many guys now consider me Felix without fear, but I hope to be able to make the cool fear. All these guys must know that Felix is afraid. So they can face their fears. I did it: at the beginning I would have considered the suit a handicap. And people with disabilities must find a way to live with their handicap”. He landed in New Mexico. He said: “When you are there at the record you don’t think anymore, you just think about getting back live.” He held a press conference. The New York Times got it: “What do you feel?”. And again: “Before jumping what you feel?”. Felix smiles: “Believe me, when you are up there at the top of the world you become humble. It is no longer a matter of records or scientific data, it is just about returning home”. He pulled out of that life. “I will do the firefighter or the rescuer in the mountains.”

It didn’t go just like that. He flew into helicopter by accumulating hundreds of hours of flight, then entering the The Flying Bulls team. He successfully tried the road to Endurance Automoticism by participating from Rookie in the 24 Hours of Nurburgring (his team reached ninth place). He made his debut in a professional boxing meeting (medium-maximous category) and managed to win him on the points. But with adrenaline he had closed. “I reached a peak and I don’t have to overcome it again.” A year after the launch Felix met one of his idols, Neil Armstrong. They were at dinner. What did you think when you set foot on the moon?, He asked. And he replied: ‘I didn’t think about setting foot on the moon. I was working ‘. He had a book full of work to be completed, so he was just popping up the things done, step by step. I thought so too. “Baumgartner’s was a collective company: eight million people had followed him live on YouTube.” They were able to look live on their screens as someone lifters up to the stratosphere, even if the next part was probably even more fascinating for them “. Before throwing herself in the void, she had a moment of ecstasy:” Sometimes you have to really go up to understand how small we are.