![]() But most of the blood vessels in your brain have also instantaneously torn loose. For a few beats, your heart continues to pump blood into the space around the heart and lungs, while no blood goes to your brain. The aorta (the huge main artery coming out of the heart) will usually rip loose from the heart. In that brief instant, cells are burst open and blood vessels are torn asunder. Your 1.5 kg brain briefly weighs 10 tonnes. On the other hand, if you stop suddenly from 200 km/hr over a distance of a few centimetres, everything in your body effectively weighs 7,500 times more than normal. You might become so terrified as you fall (which sounds very reasonable to me) that you might psychologically "freeze" and become unaware of your environment, but the actual fall does not kill you. The important thing to realise from this tale is that the act of falling freely does not kill you. He still holds two records - the only person to break the sound barrier without being in a craft, and the highest parachute jump. ![]() He landed about 12 minutes later, with no permanent injuries. There was a sudden jerk as his speed suddenly dropped to around 21 kph. His speed gradually reduced to around 200 km/hr as he dropped though the increasingly-thicker air. He fell in free fall for about four-and-a-half minutes. By 90,000 feet, he had reached about 1,149 km/hr - faster than the speed of sound. He jumped out of his open gondola, and began falling. ![]() He was kept alive by the thin newly developed MC3 pressure suit covering his entire body, and a tank strapped to his body feeding him pure oxygen to breathe. He was kept warm by many layers of warm clothing. It turns out that the air pressure is low enough at 62,000 feet to have boiled the water in his blood - and at 102,800 feet, the air pressure is actually a lot lower. On August 16, 1960, US Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger rode a helium balloon to 102,800 feet. One scenario in which you can die in free fall is that you are so high up (say above 100,000 feet or about 30 km) that the intense cold and lack of oxygen will kill. It's really hard to die while you are in "free fall", ie, falling freely through the atmosphere. The reality is that it's the huge deceleration (as you suddenly stop) that kills you. On one hand, it is kind of reassuring to believe that you won't feel any pain if you fall from a great height. The reasons given probably stem from fear of your imminent death, or a generalised terror, leading to shock, heart attack, or even asphyxiation. There's a fairly common belief that if you happen to fall from a great height, you'll be "dead before you hit the ground".
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