High There
This past Wednesday, magician David Blaine did the latest of his "physical endurance" projects. He called it Ascension, and the point was to hold on to a whole lot of balloons filled with helium and soar into the sky at least 16,000 feet -- and then skydive down and finally parachute to the ground.
The event was livestreamed on YouTube, as a YouTube Original. I'm didn't find out about it until after the fact, and that's just as well. I don't think I'd have wanted to watch it live. As much preparation as they took -- and they took a massive amount, not just preparation, but training -- it was still incredibly dangerous, and I had absolutely no interest to be watching if anything went wrong.
Nothing went wrong. He succeeded -- and in fact made it to 25,000 feet. That's almost five miles up in the air. The two biggest challenges at that height are hypothermia (It got down to one degree) and thin air.
For a while, with the first of Blaine's endurance projects, I figured that being a magician there was a trick involved. I have no idea if that was the case, but there absolutely was no trick involved here. That was him holding onto a bunch of balloons going up five miles and then skydiving down. Which makes he think that the earliest stunts were likely real, as well.
This was a mere nothing, just 6,000 feet up. It seems plenty high enough for me, but he still had four more miles to you. Mind you, as much of a "nothing" as this might seem compared to his upper heights, in some ways it was more dangerous. He didn't have his parachute on yet! He didn't put it on until about 8,000 feet. (And yes, he put it on during the flight. It's up there in the balloons, and he pulled it down.) I couldn't find out why he didn't have the parachute on from the first -- whether there was a technical reason, of if it was a part of the stunt to add an even great sense of danger to it. As if it needed much to be added...
But he did eventually pass the 8,000 foot mark and get the parachute on. And he kept going up, significantly higher. Here he is at 23,100 feet, for instance, over four miles above sea level--
And just to give you an even better perspective, rather than a lovely (if terrifying) view of the horizon, this is a from just about at the apex of his journey into the sky, taken from an overhead camera among the balloons looking straight down -- almost five miles.
To be clear, when the altitude is given, that number is -- as noted -- from sea level. And this took place in Arizona, where the starting altitude is higher to begin with, around 4,000 feet. So, you can subtract that from the MSL (Mean Sea Level) to give the AGL distance. (That's Above Ground Level, which Blaine's skydiving expert Luke Aikens explained was what skydivers most care about.)
By the way, in another video I saw, Blaine says that the reason he did this particular stunt is because his earlier ones were not only dangerous, but scary to watch, and he wanted to do one that his little daughter could enjoy. And holding balloons would be fun for her. She's there on the site, and seemingly having a fun time and very excited. But seriously, this is a stunt he considered fun to watch!.
As he lets go...
This is not a magic trick.
The main livestream was about three hours. That included two hours of showing a lot of the training and preparation, and then Blaine's was up in the air on his balloon flight for an hour. Assuming most people won't want to watch the full three hours, here's a very good edited version in about 14 minutes.
For those who do, however, want to see the full three-hour event -- or (as I did) at least skim through much of the training and preparation, and then watch all or most of the flight -- here is the whole thing.
And so, we end with this. Because...well, of course --
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