Okay so I have no idea what I am talking about since I have never jumped out of anything higher than uhmm i dunno, however a guy here in my job who's a lot into para jumping and has done the occasional base jump told me that you are actually not aware of the speed until you reach a certain heights - does the speed (if you fall straight down or forward) and no G force in involved (rapidly changing direction) has any impact on the human body at all?
Whether you "feel" the speed is
not the issue. The speed was only an incidental thing in this jump because he broke a speed record.
As for g-forces: The quintessential characteristic of free fall is that you are under a constant
downward acceleration of 1g. He was subjected to a constant 1 g acceleration.
Once he got into the flat spin, shortly after he exceeded Mach 1, the centrifugal force (which isn't really a force per se, but let's not be pedantic) was high enough that there were concerns that he would suffer loss of consciousness.
This was a jump taken to extremes, and that's what makes it noteworthy and merited serious scientific attention. NASA, for example, will be assessing the spacesuit that Baumgartner used and the viability of astronanuts performing emergency spacecraft evacuation jumps (although don't expect anyone jumping from the ISS, which at 230 miles is almost exactly 10 times higher than Baumgartner's capsule).
