Felix Baumgartner skydives into history

Many thanks to the weather for being so cantankerous for the past couple of weeks, as it pushed Felix Baumgartner's skydive from the edge of space to today - a Sunday, when everybody's home to watch it.

As of now, he's lifted off in his ginormous helium-filled balloon from his home base in Roswell, New Mexico, and is slowly ascending to around 120,000 feet where he'll jump out. If he succeeds, it'll be the world's highest and fastest - supersonic - freefall. He's wearing a space suit, and has enough GoPro cameras on him to keep YouTube in business for the next decade or so.

Here's a quick rundown of some key links to the Red Bull Stratos attempt:

• Live stream of the event from the redbullstratos.com website.
• Twitter search for #RedBullStratos, and the @RedBullStratos Twitter page itself, and the #LiveJump hashtag.
• Wiki pages for Felix Baumgartner, Red Bull Stratos and Joseph Kittinger, the guy who currently holds the record - set 52 years ago - and has been an advisor to Baumgartner's team.

Interesting fact: Dr. John Clark is also an advisor to the team. His wife, Laurel, was aboard Columbia when it disintegrated on re-entry in 2003. While this project is a huge marketing coup for an already brilliantly marketed energy drink maker, it is also intended to develop better tools, designs and processes to enable high-altitude survival for astronauts and aviators. Science can be so inspiring.

Your turn: Are you watching? What do you think?

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Update: Whew...he made it! Here's a quick list of coverage from the big event:

• CTV story
• New York Times story
• The Telegraph live blog (incl video)
• Washington Post live blog
• Agence France Presse (via Globe & Mail)
• Red Bull Stratos gallery
• Mashable.com photo/video essay

We'll leave the final word to Mr. Baumgartner himself. Just before he stepped into history, he had this to say:

"Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you are."