Have you ever thought that it would be cool to go skydiving—to jump out of a plane and float gently to the ground as a parachute balloons out behind you? The highest skydive ever made occurred in 1960 when an Air Force pilot jumped out of a balloon at 102 800 feet. How high is that? It’s way higher than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain (29 035 feet), or the flight path of a passenger plane (35 000 feet). In fact, its even higher than the highest aircraft flight ever recorded—96 863 feet! The Helios made this flight on August 13, 2001. 

Wow! If a human being can jump from such a great height and survive, what’s to keep him or her from skydiving from even greater heights—say, from outer space? A team of American scientists are busy building a special protective suit that may one day allow you to do just that. Why a special protective suit? Won’t a regular astronaut suit work? Nope, nada, no way. Why not? It turns out that there are a few dangers involved when it comes to outer space skydiving. No surprise there, but what kind of dangers are we talking about? The atmosphere (the layer of gas that surrounds the planet) is the main source of these dangers. Although you wouldn’t guess it, the atmosphere is actually very thick. It is full of a lot of different gases. The main ones are oxygen, the gas we all need for life, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. These gases actually slow you down as you fall to Earth so that you fall at a maximum speed of 120 miles per hour. Sounds pretty fast doesn’t it? But in the vacuum of outer space, there is no atmosphere to slow you down. This means that a space skydiver will fall at about 2500 miles per hour! Unless you wear a protective suit, the force generated at this speed would seriously damage your body.

So now we know speed is a problem. What is the second problem that scientists have to overcome? Stumped? Check out tomorrow’s blog post for the answer!