Stuff You Should Know - How Ejection Seats Work

Episode Date: August 20, 2013

When the Jet Age came about, pilots found they had a brand new problem with their brand new planes: how to bail out when they found themselves in a pinch at 700 mph. In the mid-1940s, aerospace engineers got to work coming up with a fascinating and complex lifesaving device, the ejection seat. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.Works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. That's Charles W. Chuck, Chuckers Bryant. This is Stuff You Should Know. You can just call us Mav and Goose for this one. No, you can't. Okay. Okay, it depends. Who's Mav and who's Goose? Well, the re-e-mail, I said that's very appropriate for the show. Why? Well, because Goose died because his ejection seed malfunctioned. I know. He hit his head on the canopy. I know. I remember. Broke his neck.

It was because he'd angered God earlier that day. I guess so. So I'll be Goose. Are you planning on dying? I'm just planning on you feeling guilt for the rest of your life. You caused the spin by being a guns blazing maverick. That is true, but I would be like, I didn't design the ejection seed. That's the guy who should feel guilty for the rest of his life. I'm going to go get a taco. I'm going to go ride my motorcycle around Miramar. It's funny when I saw Top Gun, and I may have talked about this before.

I remember thinking at the time, people die in training exercises like that. That's so Hollywooded up. As a matter of fact, that happened two years ago. It happens all the time. You never hear about it. Yeah, there's a guy. It doesn't make the papers. It doesn't. It's sad that it doesn't, but yeah, it happens. Our military died during training, and it's awful.

My brother-in-law is a helicopter pilot, as you know. And he's lost several friends through the years. In training? Yeah. Is it in crashes or from ejection seeds? Crashes. There was a guy in 2011. You know the Blue Angels? The what?

There's also the Red Arrows. Yeah, I know the Blue Angels. Okay. Well, the Red Arrows are another formation flying team, like just basically some really great pilots. Sure. And one of them was killed when his ejection seat went off while his plane was motionless. The ejection seat just accidentally went off. That's a 00 ejection.

Isn't that what that's called? Yes, but that means you're on the ground and you're not flying at all. Right. Right. But I think the problem is the plane didn't realize or the ejection, the sequencer, didn't realize that it was a 00 ejection because the parachute never deployed. So he died when he fell back down to Earth from a couple hundred feet, I would guess. Yeah. Well, this all makes sense in a second. You know what? I think as a primer before, if you're at home listening,

you can go to the YouTube site and look up like ejection seat. And there's one like slow motion on the ground, 00 ejection from film from different angles that really shows how it all works. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And you really get a sense of like, boy, they do go up a couple hundred feet. Yeah. And quick too. Very quick.

So this is not even my intro. I've got an intro. Okay. Chuck, there is a guy in World War Two who is a tail gunner on a B17 flying fortress. And this man's name was Alan McGee. He's a staff sergeant. And if you were a tail gunner on the B17, you were basically cramped into this little gun turret with your knees up to your chest.

Your head's poking out in a little clear canopy shell. Yes. And you had no room whatsoever to wear a parachute. You had to keep it in the cockpit with everybody else. Well, Alan McGee is on this B17 called the Snap Crackle Pop. And they're flying on a mission over France, St. Nazaire, which was also known as Flak City because of the anti-aircraft guns down on the ground. Right.

And sure enough, the Snap Crackle Pop took some flak, lost a wing, had a couple of holes in it, and these holes in turn put holes into McGee's parachute. So he needs to bail out. He finds a hole that's been blown into the side of the Snap Crackle Pop and jumps out at 20,000 feet. With a parachute with holes in it? With no parachute whatsoever. Because he was like, why bother?

He just knew he needed to get out of the plane quick. And he later said that he thought he had a parachute on him. Later said. Yes, he falls 22,000 feet, more than four miles to the ground, goes right through the skylight in the St. Nazaire train station and lands and lives. He had a broken right leg, broken right ankle, nearly severed right arm, 28 shrapnel wounds from the shards of glass because he fell right through plate glass from, again, 22,000 feet, four miles above the ground.

And he lived to tell about it. A German doctor apparently took very good care of him. And he later on said publicly thank the guy, even though he was a Nazi doctor for saving his life. And so I'm reading about this and this is just astounding. I'm looking into it more and more and more. And there's no trick. It's just physics. This physicist, Dr. Seth Eisenberg, no, he's not a physicist.

He's a trauma specialist. He said on popular mechanics that there's really no magic here. That he was going, McGee was going as fast as he would have been had he jumped off of something like a 12 story building. Right. Once you reach terminal velocity, it's all the same, whether it's four miles or whether it's 120 feet. It's still pretty spectacular that he fell four miles through the roof of a building and survived.

The point of all this is. So the point was, though, that he could have fallen off a 12 story building through the plate glass and everyone would have been like, wow, that's pretty awesome, but not miraculous. Yeah, compared to four miles, it's nothing. I got you. It'd still be pretty miraculous that he survived. You should die. Yeah.

You know, 12 story building. He's pretty banged up. Yeah. So the point is him just jumping out of the hole in the side of the stamp crackle pop was not that different from how you would get out of the plane in World War Two. You just kind of opened up the canopy and jumped out. Yeah. And then, you know, open your parachute at the appropriate height, right?

Right. Or altitude. When that's fine with planes, propeller planes, but once jets were introduced, you can't do that. Yeah. Because they're going so much faster than a propeller plane does. You can't just jump out. Speed of sound, dude. So around the time the jet age began, a company named Martin Baxter, a British aviation company,

started really looking into the idea of the ejection seat. Yeah. And we have that today. Thanks in large part to them. Hats off. Yeah. Real men of genius. So an ejection seat, if you don't know.

Just to put it very simply is a seat that is ejected from the aircraft via a jet. It can be a helicopter and it's a very much a last second, oh, maybe not last second, but it's the last ditch effort to save yourself when you know that that aircraft is going down. Right. Yeah. It's the that's your last resort. You don't do that frivolously because number one, airplanes are expensive. Yeah.

Yeah. They're also very dangerous. They're also very dangerous when they crash land. Yeah. And you really, I think it's probably bad form to scuttle your plane when you still have control of it. Yeah, I think so. Like, hey, I wonder what this thing does. And the article points out, and it's once you really read this thing, it's really true.

It's one of the most complex parts of an aircraft could be thousands of parts and some of these. And the object is to get the pilot out and then this attached from that seat without hitting any part of the aircraft. So like up and out in a way out of harm's way at which point you become a parachuter. Yeah, that's exactly right. You want to get the pilot into the position to just parachute down to the ground. And it all happens in under four seconds and about two to three of those seconds is the actual parachute aspect.

Like the ejection part is all in about a second to second and a half. Yes. It's pretty, pretty amazing. It is. And we're going to tell you how it works. So the process of it is fairly simple. The procedure, right? It's like just get the pilot out of the plane, above it.

Out of the way of the plane. So it can go crash. Yeah, and let the parachute happen to its thing, right? But when you look at the mechanisms involved in this, it's extremely detailed, especially since 1987 when you had the first microprocessor in charge of ejection seats. It's really neat. Yes. So let's talk about ejection seats.

Let's talk about the basics. You've got, first of all, the seat. Yes. The seat is connected. It's in the cockpit, obviously, and it's attached to rails by way of some rollers. So you might think like the seat's just like bolted to the floor. It's not. It's on rollers on these rails because those rails and rollers are going to do the initial

guidance of the chair at the proper angle out of the aircraft. Right. You can't just go up. You can't just go forward. You can't just go back, right? Nope. And when you go up those rails, you actually have to go at a certain amount of speed, and that speed has to be slightly more than the aircraft is going, or else you're not going

to clear the cockpit. Yeah. So to do that, you have what's called the catapult, which is usually a charge. Yeah. That's what gets you going up the rails and initially out, then there will be a secondary rocket that shoots you up another couple of hundred feet and clear the tail of the plane and everything. And it does it quick, too.

Yeah, it does it really quick. And this is all, this whole system is called an AES, an assisted egress system, egress meaning exit or a way out, little on the nose, but I get it. Yeah, it's military. And the canopy is, if you've ever seen like a fighter jet, they've got the clear canopy above them. Yeah, where they like wave and like give the thumbs up sign and the black power sign and all that stuff.

Yeah, where they shoot a bird at the Russian. Yes. This is in Top Gun. Remember they flew right on upside down, right above them. That seemed almost incredible. Very incredible. Yeah. And probably not real.

Well, that's what I mean. Tony Scott, RIP. So you got the canopy and the problem with the canopy is it shouldn't be there when you're trying to eject. Yeah, or else you end up like goose. It's right. So part of the assisted egress system is the canopy actually blowing and getting the heck out of the way.

If you don't have a canopy, you might have an escape hatch built into the roof. And you do all this by pulling a lever either between your legs or by your side or in the case of Top Gun. I looked at the clip today. It's two loops behind their head that they pulled, or sometimes you might pull a face curtain down in front of your face, which serves two purposes. It gets the whole system moving and protects your face. And it's not like a veil.

No. It's like it's sturdy. Yeah. It's a little curtain. And I think of like, you know what I think of when I think of curtain and planes, I think of like what they used to separate first class from coach. We don't want this to be to hit you. So here's this black, lacy veil.

He's like, I don't want to see having to bail out. So those are some of the ways, you know, there's all different kinds of systems, but that's generally how it works. Okay, so we got the general part before we go any further. Let's do a message break and let's do that. Yeah, this is about to get really good though. Yeah. 2023 is already well underway, everybody.

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Visit gate one travel.com for more information or to book your tour. That's gate the number one travel.com. Once again, use promo code heart 20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. Okay, so them's the basics. We're talking about the basics. Yeah, let's get into the nuts and bolts of this as it were. Yeah, and bolts will come into play actually. Oh yeah, specifics.

So let's talk about the seat. You've got your bucket, which is where you sit. It also, the seat comes with survival equipment, which is kind of nice. Yeah, lift it up. Some survival packs have like oxygen, so if you are bailing out and you're not attached to oxygen at a high altitude, you're going to need it. Oh yeah. They have rifles in them, which is just cool.

Blankets. What I don't get is the seat ejects from the person. So is the safety pack. This stays attached. Okay. So you're still in a sitting position with this thing attached to you. Okay. Or it's attached to your back.

Okay. Yeah, I was confused by that too. I'm glad you took the time. We covered the canopy. The catapult is obviously what initiates it, and it's operated with, like you said, a ballistic cartridge. There's a lot of explosions going on. You're riding a bullet right then.

Yeah, pretty much. When you're going up the catapult, up the rails. You got your drogue parachute, which is a small parachute, five to two to five feet in diameter that it initially pops out to sort of balance you and make sure you're not just flying all over the place and slow you down a little bit. Right, because I mean, if you're going at even a slight angle. Yeah, at the speed of sound, possibly. Yes, you need to slow down kind of quick.

Yeah. And the drogue parachute is just that little one, like the drags. Exactly. That's exactly what it is. And sometimes you know how they'll have like a small one and then a big one. They have that too on ejection seats as well. And then the drogue parachute also very commonly will trip the larger parachute too after a certain speed is reached.

That's right. What else, man? You've got your environmental sensor, which we'll get into how all this works. But that is a device that tracks airspeed and altitude. It doesn't just shoot you up and say, I hope it's okay up there. Right, exactly. And it also, depending on the readings it gets for your airspeed and altitude, it'll trip like a certain type of sequence.

Right. So like if you're at a very high altitude, there'll be a certain sequence. If you're at a low altitude, but going a very fast speed, there'll be a certain sequence and so on. And there's a car called modes of ejection. Well, we might as well go ahead and cover that. It's something called, and I had to look this up. It was named for physicist Henri Pito.

But everyone calls them pitted or pitot tubes when it really should be pitot tubes. Sure. Because he was French. But these are, when the sequence begin, it travels up the rails and exposes these tubes, and they measure air pressure and the differences in pressure to determine how fast you're going. Right. And which of these modes to enact that we're talking about. So that's part of the environmental sensor, and it sends in information of the recovery

sequencer, which is basically the chip that controls the process. That's right. So what are the three modes? Well, there's low altitude, low speed, which is less than 250 knots at less than 15,000 feet. No need for a drug parachute in this case. You barely even need an ejection seat at that point. There's mode two, which is low altitude, high speed for when you're like, you know, Maverick or something like that.

Just going really fast, but low. Yeah. And then there's high altitude, any speed. Right. The known as the scariest mode. Right. And so the, the modes are all based on, you'll notice two things. Altitude and speed, velocity.

Yeah. Right. And you put these things together and you create a graph and inside the graph inside the, the arc that's formed. Yeah. That's called the envelope and anything inside the envelope is safety. Like it's been proven. It's tested that if you follow this certain sense of certain sequence of events for this mode

within this altitude and this airspeed, you're going to most likely be fine. That's right. If you go outside of that, you are what's known as pushing the envelope. Is that where that came from? Yes. That's awesome. It is. I thought that was when you like were super cool during negotiations and you would just

write down what you wanted and push the envelope across the table. That's pushing your luck. Oh, okay. Wow. I love that. You know me and word origins. Yeah. I thought you'd like that one.

I saw it and I was like, Juck's going to love it. So let's back up a bit and start with the bailout. Your plane's not doing well. You want to eject. Your plane is sick. You want to eject and you pull the ejection handle that sets off what we already talked about, that first explosion to catapult you up the rails and into the air.

And then there is an under seat rocket motor that actually propels you even further. And when you watch this thing in slow motion, it's serious rocket propelled action going on under your butt. Yeah. And sometimes it's two stage like the catapult and then the rocket, but it's all in the same source. Right. But yeah, it's basically shooting you so you go off on a bullet and then a rocket.

Yeah. That's what happens when you're ejecting. And like you said, within the first half to one and a half seconds. Yeah. That's what all this happens. And the canopy obviously has been jettisoned at this point. And that's a really cool thing too. Like these things have to function as canopies.

So they're bolted in there. Right. And the way they're ejected is the bolts are blown by little tiny explosive charges. Right. That's called lifting the canopy. The bolts will blow and the canopy will start to fly off. But then there's another charge and another explosion toward the front. Yeah. That just shoots it off in another direction away from you as you're ejecting.

Oh, this is so cool, man. How fast it happens, how complicated it all is. Yeah. Because think about that. Like the computer sequencer still needs to know what mode to follow. So like when that canopy is starting to blow, it's taking the data readings and deciding. All this is going on in like a second. A tenth of a second even.

Yeah. So lifting the canopy is one way. You can still become injured. You can still run into the canopy just from blowing the bolts. So there's another mode or another means of getting rid of the canopy. And that's just shattering it. Yeah. That's when it basically explodes.

And it's like you got chicken wire, but the chicken wire is explosive. Yeah. Yeah. So it just evaporates. Yeah. Well, it doesn't evaporate, the slipstream just makes it go bye-bye really quickly. Yeah. So for all intents and purposes.

It evaporates. Yeah. And then we also mentioned earlier, if there is no canopy, there will be an explosive hatch that basically does the same thing. That seems the least safe to me. Why? Because you can't see through it. An explosive hatch makes me think of like some really heavy thick steel that, yes, you can't see through.

Yeah. And that is just really a hole in another bit of heavy thick steel that you might bump into on your way out. Like an escape hatch from a submarine. That's what I think of when I think of a hatch like that. Not on a plane. Yeah. You know?

Give me a shattering canopy. That's what you want. Oh, yeah. You want it to dissolve above your head. Evaporate. Evaporate. All right. So then once you're out from the rails, that secondary rocket's going to take you depends

on your weight, 100 to 200 feet up to safely clear you. And I wish we had more recent stats than this. But we have one from 1998 that said they had a 90% success rate over 463 ejections. I saw that that's kind of standard for, I saw a study from like I think 2006 or something like that and they found about 89.4. And the bad news is the other 10% means you've probably died. Yeah. You know?

So it's either success or you die. Yes. I think that's pretty much the, I think saving your life through the correct series is successful. Okay. Like if you're injured or whatever, I think they still generally count that as success. Gotcha. Um, so where are we, man? So we're at the drogue parachute.

The drogue gun fires a metal slug and it pulls out this little drogue parachute. And then like we said, then there's the secondary shoot that I think the drogue enacts that, right? Yeah. The secondary, like the main shoot. Yes. Um, so you get the main shoot out. Yeah. Before this happens though, think about this.

When you are shot out on a bullet and then on a rocket and you're going up to, I don't know, Mach 2, Mach 3, Mach 1 is 750 miles an hour. Yeah. Um, that's speed of sound, like supersonic travel. Yeah. Um, and we have planes that can go a lot faster than that. When you exit the plane like that, um, it's very easy for your seat to start to tumble and move around and spin. Yeah, or your limbs, let's say.

Well, we'll get to that. Okay. Just the seat itself. If everything's going according to plan, plan can still tumble and this, the wind resistance it meets can just push it around all sorts of weird angles. So there's something called a Vernier rocket, right? Yeah. And it's, it is a rocket that just kind of fires like, um, remember on Apollo 13 when they were, um, like shooting off the little booster rockets? Like on each side to like correct the yaw and all that.

Yeah. And pitch, that's what this rocket does. Um, or these rockets, I should say, it, it stabilizes the seat and keeps it from spinning and tumbling and makes it stay up and down. Yeah, it's got a gyroscope. Exactly. It's how it knows what it's doing. Just like your, uh, smartphone. Oh, yes.

That what the compass thing is. Yeah. Really? Well, I mean, yeah, plus when you tilt it, it knows to go sideways and. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm sure that, or I hope that ejection seats have a little more advanced systems. Yeah. But yeah, gyroscope.

Yeah. Okay. I never thought about that. Uh, maybe not a gyroscope, but something that functions in that way. Right. People are like, it's not a gyroscope. We'll find out. Yeah, we sure will.

Many times over. Okay. So Chuck, let's talk about the physics of all this. Well, first we got to cover the seat man separator motor. Oh, yeah. Okay. And that's actually, once you're in the air, you don't, you don't want, you can't land in the seat. They wanted to get you out of the seat.

Right. And that's accomplished by the seat man motor separator. Yeah. This motor, this basically goes roar and detaches the seat from you and you're, you've got your parachute on. Yeah. You've got your survival packs still, but the seat just kind of falls away to earth. And you just, um, slowly parachute down and land. And if you're captain Scott O. Grady.

Yeah. They need, you spend the next five days evading Serbs. That's right. Successfully. Successfully. So physics, my favorite topic. I know you love physics man. Uh, Newton's second law of motion comes into play here obviously because, um, force and acceleration of the crew member are really, you know, that's how you're going to live or die.

Yeah. Because when you exit a plane, you get smacked by the wind. That's right. I mean, you're going faster than the speed of sound. And while you're normally operating the plane, the plane's taken it on the chin for you. Yeah. You're not feeling this force of gravity nearly as much as you are when you're no longer surrounded by the plane and you're just exposed up there in the atmosphere.

That's right. So Newton's second law of motion states the acceleration of an object depends on the force acting upon it and the mass of the object force equals mass times acceleration. In this case, the mass is the mass of the human pilot and the chair. Right. And, uh, the, um, force, uh, no, acceleration is measured in Gs, right? Yeah. So, uh, one G equals the, the amount of one, the, the amount of the earth's gravity. Yeah.

Like when we're standing here, we're at one G right now. Right. And so let's say, um, let's say we're a hundred and eighty pound pilot, uh, at sea level, we weigh a hundred and eighty pounds. That's one G. Yeah. Um, when we're going to Gs and so on up to say 20 Gs, I believe is what the, um, an injection seat is like the best are developed for. Right. 20 Gs at 20 Gs, 180 pounds feels like 3600 pounds.

Yeah. That's the force that you encounter when you eject 3600 pounds all of a sudden of force is being exerted on your body. Yeah. And keeping in mind that one G of acceleration is equal to 32 feet per second. Yes. And it all depends on how much we weigh. Like that's how you figure out the mass, you and the chair. That's the big one.

Also, the, um, the chair needs to know how fast to go because it has to go slightly faster than the plane. Like I said, so it can clear it. That's amazing. Yeah, it is. But when, so when you eject and you suddenly encounter 20 Gs, which is the upper limits of human, um, what's the word I'm looking for? Tolerance. Yeah. Tolerance.

Um, a lot of really bad things can happen to you. That's right. And we know this thanks to our buddy colonel step. Yeah. Remember he used to have readouts from the rocket sled and man, he had some crazy stuff happen to him. So what's the formula? Um, speed equals acceleration times time plus initial speed. Or V F equals AT plus VI. Yes.

So think about this. Okay. Well, we've just said is that, um, we understand the force, which is when you go up, you are suddenly exposed to that lateral force. Yeah. Um, Getting hit in the face with that wind. Yes.

Um, and you're also being pushed out and upward. So I think you said that in some cases within the first second and a half, you are up 200 feet. Yeah. So I think you said earlier, something like you within a second, you are, you go from sitting in the plane, sitting in the plane to being up about 200 feet. Yeah. So that means you're traveling 200 feet a second upward. Yes.

So you're being pushed up like that. Yeah. While you're being exposed to speeds of upwards of 750 miles an hour, 20 Gs of force. Yeah. Um, and all of this is happening to your poor little body. So a lot of really bad things can happen to it. Sure. Um, first of all, first and foremost, I think the number one injury from ejections is spine compression.

Oh man. Because you're, you're being pushed upward at 200 feet a second. Yeah. Um, that's a lot of force exerted on your spinal column. So modern, um, ejection seats have things like leg restraints. Oh yeah, that's true. Back restraints. Yeah, head restraints.

And then that face curtain restrained your head and you are forced into a completely up and down sitting position so that your vertebra are stacked perfectly on top of one another. Yeah. Because at any kind of slip or any kind of angle leads to a slip disc very easily. Um, and there's a long standing legend that I couldn't verify that in the U.S. Air Force, after two or three ejections, you're grounded for life. Oh really? Because the spinal compressions have just basically used you up. Huh. I don't know.

I didn't see that that was true anywhere, but it's an old legend. Well, at the very least, you're not a very good pilot. Right. So they're like, yeah, maybe we should ground them. Or you're like three quarters your height that you were when you enlisted because the spinal compressions, you know. You're too short now. So that's the number one, I believe, um, injury that comes from ejection. There's also something with the horrific name limb flail.

So you're secured in your seat, your arms, your legs, your head. You're supposed to be totally immobile in that first couple of seconds, especially until your parachute opens and you slow down and everything. Yeah. If your arm gets loose, have you ever seen a dog with its head sticking out of a car window on a highway and it has real long floppy ears? Yeah, which is very dangerous. It's not something you should do to your dog. No, it's bad for your dog. You can even develop cauliflower here.

It's a bad thing to do. Get things in their eyes, all sorts of things. Let's go in like 30 to 60 miles an hour. Yeah. We're talking an arm, a human arm, going more than 750 miles an hour. When it gets loose, what you have is called limb flail and what you have are completely shattered bones, dislocated shoulders. That's a bad jam. Or just imagine going down the highway at like 65 miles an hour,

rolled on your window and then quickly just stick your arm out and multiply that times, you know, whatever. Yeah. So that's another type of injury, limb flail. There's wind blast, which so they tested this on chimps, of course. And it turns out that you can get third degree burns, severe third degree burns, just from the wind at Mach 1.7. Being exposed to that peak 1.7, Mach 1.7 for one second can give you severe third degree burns. Wow. And then there's tumbling, which you might overlook.

But think about this. Remember when... Goose. No, the real... Math. No, the real life guys. Guys. No, the dude, oh man.

O'Grady? No, the guy who jumped out of the space capsule recently. Stap? No. Oh, you know the guy? Yeah, Felix Baumgartner. Yeah. Yeah.

I can't believe I forgot that. When he jumped out, he started to tumble. Remember, he started going in over and did not look good at first. No. And the reason that that is really, really bad is because you can build up centrifugal force for your blood. And it pushes it outward to your extremities, meaning your heart doesn't have any blood to pump any longer. Wow. So you can dive very quickly.

I've seen between 200 and 400 rotations per minute proves fatal to humans. Man. How did that Baumgartner guy pull that off? I don't know. That was pretty awesome. Yeah. And hey, our own Discovery Channel covered that live, remember? Yeah, that was huge.

It was very cool. That first shot, dude. I like... I can't look at that clip. What, when he just falls out of it? Yeah, his perspective shot when he was just like, All right, I'm jumping out of something from space. Yeah, that was amazing.

Yeah, really cool. I remember, you and me now were coming back from some trip or whatever. And we just happened to be in the airport. When I remembered it was going on, I'm like, Oh yeah, we should watch this. And ended up standing there watching like one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my entire life. Yeah. I mean, that was just an amazing thing to see.

Yeah. And I bet you he wants to top it. I'm sure he's like higher still. Yeah. And do you remember the guy who did that in like the 1960 or the late 50s? Mm-hmm. Oh, he did it like in this exposed weather balloon wearing like a high altitude, a halo mask and air supply and everything. That rings a bell.

And you've seen footage of it. Did he live? Yes. But he ended up being like the whole program director for Felix Baumgartner's jump. Like he tapped him because he's the only other guy who's done anything like that. Right. And this guy did it in like the late 50s, I think. So he was literally the only person he could say,

What's it like, man? Exactly. He said it sucks. And it's awesome. Apparently he had like a hole in his glove or something like that, that they had he told them back on the ground what was going on. They would have called off the mission. Baumgartner?

No, the other guy. Oh, really? And he just didn't tell them because he wanted to do it. He had those burns, I wonder. I don't know. So that's how Felix Baumgartner works. All right, ejection seats, you got anything else? I don't have anything else.

Yeah, that one was really cool, I thought. Yeah. Very complex thing going on and very quickly and watch that super slow mo and then it shows it in regular time. It's pretty neat. Yeah. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business.

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Type that in in the search bar. And since I said search bar, it is time for Listener Mail. She is one of my oldest friends and knows me better than anyone. We have a long history of directing each other to many fabulous and geeky pursuits. But stuff you should know may be the best of them all. And I have to say, stiff competition. You're up against Tolkien, the X-Files, Star Trek,

epic rap battles of history, Dune. She says we talk all of those. Wow. I mean, I see the rap battles. Sure, Dune maybe, but Tolkien? X-Files? Star Trek? Although I don't like Star Trek. You don't like Star Trek? The movie, the TV shows, none of it?

People are going to be shocked. I've never seen a single Star Trek episode in my life. I think I did when I was a kid. Bet I would like it more as an adult now. And I saw the Wrath of Khan. Yeah, I saw that finally too. Because that was good. And then I saw the first of the new ones,

but not the one that just came out. I saw the one that just came out. It's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I'll get into it. It's just not my universe. I'm a Star Wars guy. Not that you can't be both. Can't we, you know, get over this obstacle, this arbitrary and totally unnecessary wall

between people who like Star Trek and Star Wars? It's not that I think there should be a wall. I just never got into Star Trek. Okay. Well, as long as you're not hating on Star Trek. Yeah, no, of course not. Okay, Trekkies. All right. This has been like kind of a geeky episode.

Have you noticed? Sure. Back to the email from Catherine. A couple of months ago, my friend came to visit for a weekend and we were discussing the podcast. Both made similar comments about why we enjoyed it so much. It felt like we had two really great and interesting friends with us whenever we wanted them or needed them. We both work long hours and jobs with significant pressure

and sometimes time with great and interesting friends is hard to come by. Your podcast can be a great mandate in maintaining sanity when face-to-face interaction with real friends isn't possible. So thanks for being such wonderful, imaginary stand-in slash other appropriate adjective friends and keep up the good work explaining life, the universe, and everything.

Best, Catherine with a K-R-Y-N. Well, thanks a lot. And she didn't say what her friend's name was, so I thought that was quite something. Sounds like a pretty bad friend. So Catherine's friend, hats off to you as well. Thanks for the support. Yeah, thanks for listening, you guys.

If we have brought you closer together with a friend, we want to hear about that. That's always very nice to hear about. You can let us know by tweeting to us on Twitter. Our handle is syskpodcast. We're on facebook.com at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at discovery.com. That's close.

And then, of course, we have our little abode due web stuff you should know.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the all-new 2014 Toyota Corolla. You're ready to travel in 2023 and since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less.

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