What is the highest height a human has fallen from?

Answer 1

== The Air Force put together Project Excelsior to test some parachute designs. This was back in '59 and '60. In the test, Captain Joseph Kittinger performed a number of jumps, and in one of them, he set the world record for the highest parachute jump, the longest parachute freefall and the fastest freefall. One jump, three world records. And all of them still stand. Capt. Kittinger jumped from a balloon at 102,800 feet (about 19.47 miles, or 31.33 km) in his highest ascent. More information is available at the Wikipedia article on this short but exciting bit of experimentation. On the 26th of January, 1972, Vesna Vulović, a JAT stewardess, survived a fall of some 33,000 feet (or about 10,000 meters) when the aircraft she was crewing was blown up in the air. A link can be found below to the Wikipedia article on free-falls where you can read more about this. And yet, there is a higher fall known: from the moon. Or, to be more exactly, even a little beyond, due to the orbit of the spacecraft. Explanation: The moon is orbiting around earth, which physically is a free fall around the earth. Thus, the astronauts were falling from the moon, back to earth, as they were attracted by the gravity of earth. Of course they had to leave the gravity of the moon, first. But as moon already is falling around earth, the complete process can be interpreted as a fall, even though there had to be an initial acceleration to give the fall the right direction - to earth. More information is available at the Wikipedia article about, e.g., the Apollo project of the NASA.