Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from stratosphere, dies in Italy

https://www.theinternational.at/felix-baumgartner-who-jumped-from-stratosphere-dies-in-italy/

82•signa11•4h ago

Comments

lode•3h ago

https://archive.is/2025.07.17-234516/https://www.theinternat...

justmarc•3h ago

Such a shame. People who have met him have always said he was a stand up guy.

Definitely a man who pursued his passions.

RIP.

cenamus•3h ago

Definitely caused some controversy in recent years aswell, like recommending Orban for the peace nobel prize. Literally the man that turned Hungary into the poorest and most illiberal EU country. But again, Baumgartner prefers dictatorships to democracy.

falseprofit•3h ago

*preferred…

neuroelectron•2h ago

At least they maintained communism, even if officially it stopped being communist, it was still de facto communist and that's why it became so poor. Don't think of them as poor but as equal outcome.

biggestlou•2h ago

What on Earth are you talking about?

miningape•2h ago

Yeah I starved to death, but at least we all died equally starved!

Equality of outcome is the cruelest lie the untalented, lazy, and comfortable tell each other. They assume it means raising the bar to their level instead of drawing it on the ground. It's enforced mediocrity, peddled by those who fear effort and resent excellence.

cenamus•2h ago

Equal outcome? Like 99% of power in Hungary is split between Orban and his uni dorm buddies. The guy doesn't even have any ideology, just loves power, money and football. Used to be bearded liberal left wing, turned gelled hair far right after the first thing didn't pull any voters. Didn't care about immigrants until the far far right party got some votes on the issue and then started leaning in heavily.

District5524•2h ago

Communism in Hungary was introduced and kept up by Soviets after the 2nd ww. The very considerable difference between Orban and Kadar (the longest serving communist leader) is that Kadar paid attention not to make his direct family and direct friend the most exorbitantly rich guys in 15 years, which probably also made lots of mid-income people poorer in Hungary. And despite very strong democratic backsliding in many areas, it is still more democratic than during Soviet-led times. But that's probably not due to Mr Orban's character or self-restraint. Baumgartner's idea is probably related to fashionable libertarian ideas of those rich people who never had the patience to feel sympathy for other people, nor to study history or humanities, but feel like they should have a say.

inglor_cz•2h ago

I remember Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize not even a year into his first term, with no concrete peace-related achievements under his belt. There are also Kissinger, Abiy Ahmed and Yasser Arafat on the list of laureates. Overall, it might be the weakest of the Prizes, in the "too dependent on momental popularity and political pressure" sense.

The scientific Nobels + Literature are usually awarded with a decent time gap after the relevant achievement, which helps. Maybe the Nobel Peace Prize should only be awarded to professionally retired people over 70. That would prevent it from being too politicized.

volleyball•52m ago

(Shimon Peres too in list of questionable peace laureates)

kzrdude•43m ago

The people awarding the prizes have the task of interpreting the will, effectively, the published quote is that the: "prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind"

and the sentence specifically for the peace prize is:

"and one part to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses."

https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-will/

I don't know, legally, how much leeway the foundation has to interpret the will, but it certainly has not been 100% strict about the interpretation.

If the peace prize is given most strictly adhering to the will - looking at work done in the last year - then it is no wonder that it's considered weak or depending on the moment's popularity.

cenamus•21m ago

The over 70 criteria wouldn't help much nowadays, with basically every leader being in his 70s+ (Trump, Biden, Xi, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Khomeini, Putin, etc.)

j3th9n•11m ago

You have your information from the corporate media.

gsf_emergency_2•3h ago

>Illness

Unreviewed translation of "Unwohlseins"

Other media hint at seizure/cardiac arrest.

pantalaimon•2h ago

"feeling unwell" would be the more direct and more correct translation

mithras•1h ago

I wouldn't agree, it's a big step beyond just feeling unwell. With this word I would think someone might need medical assistance.

Xenoamorphous•3h ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596845

sneak•3h ago

AP says it was a paraglider crash.

lordnacho•3h ago

If you die on your first parachute jump, you're unlucky.

If you live your entire life doing these "small chance each time" stunts, maybe we should not be so surprised that your eventual demise was this kind of thing.

Was an interesting character, RIP.

kylecazar•3h ago

Definitely a true statement, but reports are saying he was already unconscious as he fell, so some open questions remain

Simon_O_Rourke•2h ago

Not that I doubt the reports, but how could anyone possibly make that call?

catlikesshrimp•1h ago

Yes. A pathologist can know if there was a catasthropic event like the natural rupture of an artery (e.g. stroke, heart attack) In vivo events evolve differently than post mortem ones, e.g. strangling a dead body shows differently than strangling a person to death.

More recently, he might have been wearing a vital signal monitor that kept logs.

Nowadays probably the latter.

diggan•1h ago

Someone so famous and regularly doing spectacular things surely have a bunch of sensors attached to them that reports a bunch of metrics about their physiological state.

ngruhn•2h ago

Well if "unconscious" happens to you in a restaurant you don't fall out of the sky.

0x000xca0xfe•37m ago

The final result is often similar while driving. Or walking down a flight of stairs, at least for oneself.

baobabKoodaa•11m ago

No it's not. In both examples you are very likely to survive. This is different than the ~0% chance of survival Felix had in the air.

Simon_O_Rourke•2h ago

There's a concept I read about before called micromorts, where activities are given a danger rating something like the expected number of fatalities per million events.

So riding a motorbike 100 miles is 8 micromorts.

Hang-gliding is 9 micromorts.

Base jumping is 430 micromorts.

And summiting Everest is 37,000 micromorts.

Incidentally, of those - I know of two guys who died either on Everest or at base camp there over the past 15 years. First guy fell on the descent, and the second guy developed health issues at altitude (apparently related to an Israeli team immediately prior stealing their oxygen bottles).

d_e_solomon•2h ago

I try to calibrate risk based on the likelihood of dying during my commute. I'm glad that there is a more standardized scale!

smus•52m ago

Is there anything you do that ends up being more dangerous? Genuinely curious

criddell•38m ago

I often think about this while riding my bicycle to work. The exercise and quiet time surely has a positive impact on my health span, but being among cars risking collision and breathing in exhaust is a negative. What’s the net result?

perilunar•33m ago

Well if you commuted by riding 100 miles per day on a motorbike for 40 years your total risk is roughly 77,000 micromorts (77 millimorts?), or double the risk of summiting Everest once!

Kalibr•53m ago

lol, Israelis stealing things on every corner of the planet

perilunar•48m ago

> summiting Everest is 37,000 micromorts

That's only 3.7 % — I imagined it was higher.

Does the death rate of 'summiting' include those who die before they reach the top? or those that abandon an attempt and survive?

hhmc•47m ago

I feel like you want some higher moments on these. At least the standard deviation would be useful on top of the expectation.

gdiamos•32m ago

probability is memoryless.

If you have been base jumping for 20 years, you have the same risk on your next jump as someone trying it for the first time.

vladgur•13m ago

A lot more than 2 people die on Everest per year according to Wikipedia and I’m sure oxygen bottle theft plays a role but I haven’t read anything attributing deaths to “Israeli team stealing oxygen bottles”.

Mind sharing where you got these news from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbi...

lionkor•3h ago

I watched him jump live, that was incredibly cool and spooky when he started tumbling. I won't forget that

meta-level•3h ago

Reminds me of Yuri Gagarin, first man in space who later died in a plane crash..

cwicklein•2h ago

And me of Francis Gary Powers.

Muromec•2h ago

First man who returned from space alive

mongol•55m ago

No man, dead or alive, returned from space before him

neuroelectron•2h ago

>Austrian extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner (56) died on Thursday afternoon in a paragliding accident

quite a legacy

jboggan•2h ago

My 4-year-old daughter asks to watch his Red Bull Stratos jump almost every night before bed. She's obsessed with space because of him and says "Felix is my favorite astronaut." May he continue to inspire.

laurent_du•1h ago

My son was literally asking me about him yesterday. Wonder how many kids think about him every day.

basisword•2h ago

I was just watching his jump again last week. Was surprised to find his record only stood for a couple of years before someone went higher in a much less media-covered jump.

franze•1h ago

2 years later by a Google guy without much media circus

sitkack•1h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace

Rygian•2h ago

The bystanders, and especially the poor woman who was injured in the accident, have for sure lived a traumatizing experience.

RcouF1uZ4gsC•2h ago

> Baumgartner lost control of his motorized paraglider due to a sudden illness and crashed into a hotel pool.

He may have died while paragliding rather than from paragliding.

A heart attack or stroke could have been the actual cause of death

Zigurd•1h ago

Red Bull athletes list: https://www.redbull.com/us-en/athletes

The dead ones appear to have been removed from the list, and from all other mentions on the website. Quickly, too. Somebody's got that in their job description.

I no longer find it entertaining to watch sports where there is such a high risk of death, or lifelong impairment, from brain injuries, for example. I used to love ski movies. But too many of the people in the credits are dead now.

Apart from things like unconscionable contracts, I wouldn't restrain people from extreme sports. I'm sure a lot of of them die in their beds. I just don't find it entertaining to watch.

Waterluvian•1h ago

I feel that Penn explained this incredibly well in one of my favourite magic tricks:

https://youtu.be/Jko5BGhc-Ys?si=Uz6jvQ5voEYAxg8W

We have such a weird relationship with the spectacle of risk. As he says, a tightrope act is just as difficult at any height. The only need to make it dangerous is because the audience wants the circus.

And I think somewhat implicit in the point he’s making is that he believes that while the audience wants the spectacle, the performers have a responsibility not to give it to them.

xanderlewis•54m ago

> a tightrope act is just as difficult at any height

Well, sort of. But surely part of the feat is overcoming the natural fear of heights.

Waterluvian•42m ago

That’s true. But I don’t think anyone in the audience is being wowed by that detail.

Barrin92•37m ago

That's exactly what they're wowed by. The general audience cares about the risk-taking, the bravery and daring aspect of it, and maybe the visual flashiness. It's the psychology that's interesting to a general audience because that's what they relate to. Technical excellence is always something peers are more interested in than spectators, your ordinary viewer isn't invested in the technical proficiency of tightrope footwork.

baobabKoodaa•15m ago

There's 3 distinct things:

A) The ability of walking a tightrope

B) The ability of overcoming your fears to the extent of being able to walk a tightrope at a dangerous height

C) The risk of falling

I would argue that the audience cares about A and C. The audience doesn't care so much for B.

gdbsjjdn•1h ago

There's a level of economic coercion involved though as well - "going pro" is only possible by pushing for riskier and riskier stunts. If you want to get paid to ski, skateboard, etc you need to be doing increasingly extreme things to risk your own health and safety. The companies do lots of risk mitigation once you're filming a TV spot, but to get to that level you already had to be putting your body on the line for years.

perilunar•57m ago

The ethical thing is to refuse to be complicit by refusing to watch.

franze•1h ago

Here in Austria he was a very controversial person cause of his stance on democracy, right wing views and conflicts with Austrian journalists.

antonvs•31m ago

He should have come to live in the US, he would have been welcome in the current administration.

jjcob•1h ago

Austrian newspaper Der Standard [1] is reporting that he was using a camera attached with a string, and authorities are considering the possiblity that it got caught in the propellor, leading to a collapse of the parachute.

Allegedly he tried to open the emergency chute, but was already too low.

[1]: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000280134/justiz-in-ita...

stillsut•1h ago

Curious parallel to Gary Powers: the man who fell from the stratosphere in a shot down U2 and later in life died crash landing into a populated area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Gary_Powers#Death

MarkMarine•41m ago

I’m the a moon’s distance away from a being a pro athlete or pushing any adventure sports field I participate in, but I do things for fun that some people think are insanely dangerous. I’ve toned it back now that I have kids (which changed my thinking) but for a long time I would have been quite happy with that exit from life. Doing something I loved, never put through indignity of advanced age, dying quickly and without suffering.

God speed Felix

tetris11•33m ago

I used to walk across pitched roofs 3-floors up as a teen, and squeeze between cars and busses on my bike in narrow london roads (back before bike lanes were a thing) to the point that I would routinely get to my job with bloodied knuckles.

At the time I was clearly just vibing off the adrenaline, but looking back on it all as mature adult... I get heart palpatations.

There are many parallel worlds where I am not alive, and I think of those other selves often.

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