Google executive breaks record for highest skydive [VIDEO]

Google executive breaks record for highest skydive [VIDEO]

Alan Eustace, 57, a senior vice president at Google, completed a 25-mile (135,890 ft) descent from the upper stratosphere on Friday, breaking the previously held record of two years.

Alan Eustace, 57, a senior vice president at Google, completed a 25-mile (135,890 ft) descent from the upper stratosphere on Friday, breaking the previously held record of two years. His fall reached a maximum speed of 822 miles per hour, setting off a small sonic boom heard by those nearby on the ground.

Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from 128,100 feet on Oct. 14, 2012, was a known daredevil sponsored by Red Bull. Eustace, on the other hand, is a Vice President of Knowledge at Google. The tech company offered to assist financially on the project, but out of fear that the event would turn into a marketing ploy, Eustace turned the offer down, according to the New York Times.

Eustace worked with Paragon Space Development Corporation, which designed a life-support system to make it possible for him to breathe pure oxygen in a pressurized space suit during his rise and descent. Eustace spent four hours before the descent in an oxygen chamber ridding his body of all nitrogen, in order to more efficiently metabolize energy at such high altitudes.

The designed trip also involved a helium balloon that in two hours carried him to the required altitude, a drogue parachute to stabilize the fall, and a main parachute to safely return Eustace to the ground.

“As we were watching him go up today, somebody asked us what the record was,” Paragon Space Development CEO Grant Anderson told Forbes. “We had to look it up! It was cool to break the record, but frankly it was not in the forefront of our minds at all.”

World View Experience, a spinoff company from Paragon, is developing a similar system to take tourists up to the stratosphere and see the curvature of the Earth.

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