Alan Eustace, a senior vice president at Google, set a new world record on Saturday by taking a big leap from the edge of space and completing the highest altitude free fall from over 130,000ft above earth.

Wearing a specially designed spacesuit, the 57-year-old Google executive broke the previous altitude record that was set by the Austrian Felix Baumgartner in 2012.

Eustace was lifted in the morning of Saturday by a balloon filled with 35,000 cubic feet of helium and returned to earth just 15 minutes after starting his fall.

‘It was amazing,’ he told the New York Times. ‘It was beautiful. You could see the darkness of space and you could see the layers of atmosphere, which I had never seen before.’