In the end, I did not see Baumgartner’s successful – in so far as he did not die – leap from the edge of space. I suppose I must have been doing something that I could not stop doing, or did not want to stop doing, in order to tune into YouTube and wait for the dreary moving about of heavy equipment in the sunlit New Mexico desert to finally produce its promised climax. Nonetheless, I did check the news at some point that afternoon with the specific intention of finding out whether or not Baumgartner had jumped and, if so, whether he’d survived. Later, I browsed images of the death-defying ascent and (this latter defying death at a higher rate of speed) descent. There was no shortage of them: images of Baumgartner sitting in his capsule, images of the capsule dangling from that giant silver balloon, of Baumgartner standing at the edge of the capsule holding onto a pair of handrails like someone stepping into a chilly swimming pool, and then of him falling forward as though, perhaps not altogether fearlessly, pushed by the weight of the parachute strapped to his back; images of Baumgartner, the parachute deployed, coasting gently downward, and images of him landing softly on the yellow desert floor, dropping to his knees, standing again with the mask on his astronaut’s helmet raised, thrusting his arms in the air in victory, hollering, waving, grinning madly.
The image I found most affecting, however, is one that appears to have been taken from above just moments after Baumgartner jumped. Freed of the bulk of the capsule, his body gone flat, graceful, so that, with his legs behind him and his arms at his sides, slightly bent at the elbows, he looks a bit like one of those flying squirrels one learned about in science class that can soar up to 300 feet from treetop to treetop. Below him, though, is not the forest floor but just this vast, virtually incomprehensible emptiness and, beyond that, the Earth, looking not quite, but almost, like a planet. The Red Bull logo is visible in various places – on Baumgartner’s helmet, his parachute pack, and on the left shoulder and left leg of his uniform – but if on the ground they’re presence seemed a subtle reminder that this grand endeavor would not have been possible without the support of an energy drink company looking to spend a buck in order to make back two, here, with nothing but Baumgartner himself between them and utter oblivion, it is a reminder that, even now, without the support of the human body at its limits every profit-making effort would still be doomed from the start.
Knee-jerk Marxist or not, I will try to remember this the next time I’m told that it is the market that dictates life, in this new world order of ours, and not the other way around.
"After the Fall: On Project Stratos", Eli S. Evans
