Swiss inventor Yves Rossy took Elton John's Rocket Man just a little to seriously

Remember those cool jet packs you saw in the movies as a kid? Well, they’re for real, folks, as we saw this week, when Swiss inventor/daredevil/rocket man Yves Rossy jumped out of a perfectly good helicopter and treated onlookers in Rio De Janeiro and the Christ the Redeemer statue to a little jet-powered ingenuity before landing on Copocabana Beach.

At present, Rossy is the only man ever to have had the pleasure to live out his wildest Jetsons wet dreams, as his jet pack, which he invented himself, is the only one in existence (darn!), though this wasn’t his debut flight. Rossy became the first man every to fly with a jet pack back in 2009 when he did a fly by over the Swiss Alps.

And I thought the Swiss just made clocks and chocolate…

Anyway, a little video of Rossy’s adventures high over Rio de Janeiro in his jet pack. Let’s see how long before he auctions it off on Ebay…

The on-again-off-again Felix Baumgartner space jump is on again, according to statements from Red Bull and various media outlets including BBC .

Baumgartner is, as you may recall, an Austrian daredevil with a penchant for jumping off stuff that he really shouldn’t, but he does anyway, and it makes for some sick video. That’s why he’s awesome. On his list of de-virginized BASE Jumps, Petronas Towers, Taipei 101 and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio De Janeiro. God bless you Felix Baumgartner.

But it’s his next jump, planned for several years now, that I blogged about a few years ago, that’s really gonna drop your jaw. This time he’s setting the record for a free fall – he’s jumping from a location up, WAAAYYYY up, 36 kilometres above the Earth, in what’s been dubbed ‘The Space Jump’.

If he’s successful, the jump will eclipse the previous record, set by Joe Kittinger in 1960, in which Kittinger did a 31 kilometer free-fall. Cojones the size of watermelons that man has.

Baumgartner’s Space Jump, assuming it happens, will have him falling so fast he’ll actually break the sound barrier. That will be the first time man has achieved that speed without assistance from a machine.

BBC and National Geographic are working on the documentary. Will keep an eye on this one…

Watch the video, and hear Joe Kittinger as he speaks of his 50 year old record and passing the torch, so to speak. I still think it’s touching everytime this man talks about working up the courage to set such a crazy record, and how he “said a little prayer” before he jumped.

The picture says it all.  Daredevil Austrian BASE Jumper Felix Baumgartner scaled one of the largest and certainly most famous statues on Earth way back in January 1999.  What made this jump so spectacular was that this was the lowest BASE jump on record at the time.  At 95 feet, Baumgartner had just seconds after jumping to pull his chute.  The high jumps like Burj Khalifa might be sexier, but it’s low jumps like this that are riskier because there’s precious little time for the parachute to open before the jumper becomes road pizza.  This jump went down in history as one of the most dangerous, and most spectacular ever caught on film, and enough to make Environmental Graffiti’s The 5 Most Mindblowing BASE Jumps in History, and my own personal thumbs up.