[dkokelley]

You're right about acceleration being an issue. It's possible that altitude is negligible compared to orbital velocity. I'm not sure what you mean by Baumgartner wasn't 10% of the way to the ISS. The ISS is at 370km, and the jump was from almost 40km. Of course there are other technical hurdles to getting there, but I was only referring to pure altitude.

[phreeza]

Considering kinetic and potential energy together, adjusted for weight, he was about .5% there. 6.310^7 (m/s)^2 vs 3.810^5 (m/s)^2