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" In the spring of 2010, I spent several weeks in the orbit of Felix Baumgartner and his Red Bull Stratos team, watching them prepare for a record-setting stratospheric skydive that was, at the time, scheduled to take place that summer. I was impressed by Felix&amp;#039;s team, though Felix himself came across as a bit of a show pony: I remember him showing up for a test jump one afternoon with petroleum-based gel in his spiked hair, a fashion statement that was also, as an irritated member of the team pointed out, a serious safety hazard in the pure-oxygen environment of his pressure suit.  On Sunday afternoon, I watched the live stream of Felix&amp;#039;s long-delayed jump. I watched it on my iPhone, at the New Orleans Convention Center, on day two of the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. There are approximately 30,000 neuroscientists here, presenting and imbibing new research. These people, they&amp;#039;re explorers, pioneers. Some of the discoveries they&amp;#039;re making \u2014 about how our brains work, how they malfunction, and how they can be improved \u2014 are as ground-breaking, potentially, as any of the great scientific discoveries in history.  But everything at the conference seemed to pale and recede when Felix stepped out of that capsule, suspended on the edge of space, and looked down at the world 127,000 feet below his feet.  The exploration of outer space still has the potential to captivate in ways that the exploration of inner space struggles to. The human brain may be the most complex and mysterious machine in the universe, a machine we still barely understand even the simplest things about, but neuroscience experiments never require a dashing Austrian to step into the most bad-ass looking spacesuit ever made, ride an arena-sized balloon twenty-four miles up, then plummet through thin air at speeds in excess of Mach 1.  Red Bull Stratos was, by all criteria, a PR triumph. Fifty television channels covered the jump live, seven-million people watched it stream online, and @redbullstratos has 235,000 followers and counting. But beyond the dazzle, beyond the slickness and the spectacle, is Felix&amp;#039;s achievement really that important?  It is. He&amp;#039;s demonstrated that human beings can safely fall further, and faster, than was previously known to be possible. This has real applications in the development of the emergency systems that will be essential for the advancement of manned spaceflight. For humans to finally reach further afield, for us to break our current forty-year-long holding pattern, we&amp;#039;ll need to make giant leaps in both rocket and safety technology. Dr. Jonathan Clark, one of the members of the team that made Felix&amp;#039;s feat possible, lost his wife, the astronaut Laurel Clark, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up at an altitude very close to the altitude from which Felix jumped. The lessons learned on Sunday might help us avoid similar catastrophes in the future.  Beyond that, there&amp;#039;s something refreshing about the idea that millions of people spent at least a few minutes marveling at the old-fashioned exploits of a brave man in a spacesuit. The current doldrums of our national space program have nothing to do with a lack of interest on the part of the public. We&amp;#039;re still fascinated. We still yearn to go up, higher and higher.  Felix floated safely to the ground, of course, and I&amp;#039;m about to dive back into the neuroscience conference. The particulars of Felix&amp;#039;s jump \u2014 the way he accelerated and twisted and turned, how he positioned his body in order to prevent an uncontrollable spin, the reasons behind the apparent failure of his visor-heating apparatus \u2014 will all be scrutinized in the months to come. Personally, I&amp;#039;m more curious about Felix himself, about the stark and indisputable fact of his remarkable courage. And \u2014 who knows? \u2014 I might find some answers in a research presentation I&amp;#039;m about to check out: &amp;quot;Fear Learning in the Amygdala and Beyond.&amp;quot;  EARLIER: The Man Who Would Fall to Earth (August 2010) (Here&amp;#039;s a video we made for that story, for a little context on how crazy Sunday really was....)      Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/cars/a16262/felix-baumgartner-jump-13727965/>