Now that everyone's over the initial awe that comes from watching someone do something as crazy as jumping out of a balloon at 128,000 feet and plummeting toward the Earth at supersonic speeds, it's time to find out what practical application can be had from it.
That's easy: The military can use the technology to drop Special Forces operatives into enemy territory from really, really far away as DefenseTech explains. And the best part is that there would be almost no way conventional radar systems would be able to see the little dots of potentially violent energy coming their way.
There's always the off chance that a random guy with an AK-47 could spot a guy dropping in by parachute, but turn that mission into a night raid, with highly trained killers wearing night vision goggles and body armor, and armed to the teeth with laser sight MP5s, and the bad guys will never know what hit them.
As of right now, the military's HALO jumps (that's high altitude, low opening) have a ceiling of about 35,000 feet. If special operators jumped from 100,000+ feet, they could be start their fall in one part of the world and be over an entirely different continent by the time they got to parachute deployment altitude.
Talk about sneaky; the possibilities are endless. And if this actually came to pass, it would remove these doubts I now have about my country being able to do something more badass than an energy drink company.
Photo credit: Associated Press