On Sunday morning, the 65th anniversary of Chuck Yeager’s historic supersonic flight in the Bell X-1, Austrian base jumper Felix Baumgartner became the first person to ever go faster than the speed of sound without the benefit of a craft.
The record came after Baumgartner leapt from an altitude of 128,000 feet from the gondola of a balloon over the New Mexico desert, freefalling for more than four minutes before deploying his chute at 5,000 feet.
