Amazing jump.

Q 11. Cost approximately 3M US - revenue to red bull priceless.

'It does but not a very big one. Baumgartner reported that he didn’t feel it or hear it.'

This is an inadequate answer, evidently flying magazine has a resident self-qualified armchair aerodynamicist. A sonic boom is a pressure wave created by the supersonic passage of an object through the air, it is inaudible to the object, or occupant travelling supersonic because they themselves are creating the pressure wave, the 'BOOM' is only audible if you experience the pressure wave impact. Concorde passengers never heard the plane go BOOM as it passed through Mach 1... people on the ground probably did but the 'sonic boom' is not a singular event the occurs when passing through the threshold of Mach 1, it is a continuous wave dragged along by the supersonic object all the while it is travelling above Mach 1. Any person passed by a supersonic object will hear the boom!

And finally, as for 'not a very big one', this assertion is made on the basis of what? That a little spaceman isn't big enough to make a very big bang? Have you ever heard a 7.62mm assault rifle being fired? The 'crack' you hear from large caliber rifles is the sonic boom being made by the bullet, and that's a projectile much smaller than a whole man in a space suit! The 'boom', if you had been hovering at altitude while Felix zoomed past you in free fall, would have been VERY loud, but because the pressure waves would have radiated out horizontally and dissipated into the atmosphere it would have been inaudible on the ground because Felix was travelling vertically! Sonic booms heard from supersonic aircraft flying overland are only heard because they are travelling horizontally and part of the shockwave is directed down toward the ground.

http://blogs.solidworks.com/solidworksblog/2012/03/supersonic-sky-diving...

I thought it was clear that Felix was joking about the boom, but I've fixed that. Should have been more literal here. As far as balloon/capsule is concerned, thanks for your feedback. No, he never jumped from a balloon but from a gondola/capsule, though "balloon" is often, as here, used as shorthand for the entire system. Thanks for all the feedback.

Maybe (and that's a key word here) the sonic boom was weak because:
1- The speed was barely above that of the sound. I think he barely made it to M 1.1. It's quite often in modern airliners that the airflow around it achieves, in some zones, slightly supersonic speeds, but since the freestream is actually subsonic the supersonic flow must necessarily slow down again to subsonic speeds, and the only way for supersonic flow to slow down is with a shock wave, so shockwaves are formed, but they are weak enough that when a triple 7 cruises 33.000 ft above your you don't feel any sonic boom.
2- The supersonic speed was achieved at a very high altitude, where even the enormous drag coefficient of such a blunt object at transonic and supersonic speeds plus the high speed itself made little drag due to the extremely low density. I guess that in such conditions, the energy carried by a shockwave must be weak. I mean, ok, there is a brisk increase in air pressure, but few air molecules are involved. Or anybody ever heard the shockwave of the Space Shuttle during re-entry?

Is that a joke?
It's obvious that motion is relative. Nothing is moving or not moving until you state about what, that is, the frame of reference.
The people on the North pole is moving about the Sun much faster than what you said about the people on the Equator. And what is "the speed of sound" anyway? The sound in the hardened steel travels way much faster than your people on the Equator. With these "constructions" we will be soon talking about going faster than light.
But when you talk "supersonic", you talk of the speed of something about the surrounding medium where sound waves propagate. Now, what were you saying about the people on the Equator?

At an aviation seminar in Puyallup, Washington several years back a military pilot speaker told of ejecting from his crippled jet that was going virtually straight down at something like 800 MPH. His flight suit was torn off him and he was badly injured. Unfortunately his back seater was torn apart and died. According to the pilot it was the highest speed from which anyone had ever ejected and survived.

Question No. 6, How much it cost. According to some newspapers about $ 50 million. Red Bull sponsor (power drink) argued that a number of scientific tests would be carried out expanding the knowledge about physiology of the human body and this and that. Well this is just a bunch of baloney as this was done only for advertisment. If you bring this arguments to Flight Surgeons at Nasa, Air Force and Navy they will laugh at you, there is nothing that the stunt revealed that they did not know for years. For $ 50 million they got millions of viewers watching the saga on TV around the world and also reams and reams of newspaper reporting this stunt. Had they had to pay for this coverage it would have been in the hundreds of millions.

Thanks usad