A skydiver once broke the sound barrier with his own body

On 14 October 2012, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner stepped off a capsule lofted by a helium balloon to nearly 39 kilometres - about three and a half times the cruising altitude of an airliner - and dropped back toward New Mexico.

During the plunge he reached 1,357.6 km/h (843.6 mph), roughly Mach 1.1, becoming the first human to break the sound barrier in freefall, without the protection of a vehicle. The speed of sound at that height is about 1,236 km/h; he sailed past it.

The stunt, called Red Bull Stratos, was more than spectacle. Baumgartner wore a pressurised suit because the near-vacuum and brutal cold of the stratosphere would otherwise be lethal, and engineers studied how the human body copes there - data that informs the design of future escape systems for high-altitude flight and spaceflight.