Babel News Network

The Antikythera Mechanism turns out to be a complex mechanical planetarium – accurate enough to predict eclipses. The operator could dial in a date and determine the location of sun, moon and five planets. It uses an astronomical model settled by Apollonius. Not bad for something like 200 BC. It seems there may have been workshops in Greece (and/or Hellenistic Egypt) churning out these and other highly technical machines — such as those described a century later by Hero of Alexandria. This one may have been intended as a gift for Julius Caeser – if only because it dates from that time, and was found in the remains of a Roman shipwreck on the Greek coast.

A clip from a Discovery channel documentary featuring film from the highest ever skydive, by Joe Kittinger, in 1960.

“ On August 16, 1960.. Kittinger floated to 102,800 feet (31,333 meters) in Excelsior III, an open gondola adorned with a paper license plate that his five-year-old son had cut out of a cereal box… He remained at peak altitude for about 12 minutes; then he stepped out of his gondola into the darkness of space. After falling for 13 seconds, his six-foot (1.8-meter) canopy parachute opened and stabilized his fall, preventing the flat spin that could have killed him.

During his descent, he reached speeds up to 614 miles per hour, approaching the speed of sound without the protection of an aircraft or space vehicle. But, he said, he “had absolutely no sense of the speed.”

Kittinger was testing the idea that future astronauts could bail out of stricken spacecraft and sky-dive back to earth. His high-altitude records remain unbeaten.