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How to Train the Fearless Mind
The scientific way to control your fight-or-flight instincts
Before Felix Baumgartner aspired to leap off a balloon capsule 24 miles above Earth, he was already known to his fans as Fearless Felix. He had jumped off the two highest buildings in the world and skydived across the English Channel wearing a carbon‐fiber wing. He had stood at the rim of a 600‐foot‐deep cave in Croatia and plummeted into the black void, emerging as fearlessly triumphant as ever.
The prospect of the first supersonic leap from the stratosphere didn’t faze him either, not at first. He eagerly went to the Mojave Desert in California, near the Air Force base where the first supersonic flights took place, to train under the guidance of aerospace experts. When asked about the risks, he calmly ticked off the ways he could die during the mission: The enormous gossamer balloon, 40 acres of plastic thinner than a dry‐cleaning bag, might be destroyed by surface winds in the first several thousand feet of the ascent, sending him crashing to the ground with no chance to deploy a parachute. If his suit lost pressure in the thin air at 120,000 feet, his blood would start to boil.
But neither of those was as much of a worry as the possibility of losing control of his body during the fall. As he accelerated to more than 700 miles per hour, part of his body would break the sound barrier while the rest of it was still subsonic, possibly creating turbulence that would cause a fatal “red‐out,” in which the body spins so fast that blood starts spurting out of the eyes.
“We just don’t know what to expect when the body goes supersonic,” Felix said one afternoon during his training. “I do have fears. But I have learned to control my fear so that it doesn’t get in the way.” So he thought, anyway.
At age 41, he’d made more than 2,500 jumps as an Austrian military paratrooper and professional daredevil, but for this one, he had to deal with a new challenge: a customized space suit and helmet. When he wore it during training sessions on the ground, he couldn’t feel the outside air or hear anything except the sound of his own breathing. At times, he felt trapped and desperate to get out of it. But he remained confident nonetheless.
