I've found that here people define science as the practice of pushing boundaries in a positive way with a positive outcome and with positive motivations. Perhaps it's cultural, but I don't really consider this to be a good definition of science; perhaps it's a good definition of a subset of R&D. As a current working "scientist" most of my work isn't pushing boundaries at all. I do the same thing that they've been doing in labs since the 1960's. I consider science to be a decision-making algorithm - a means of determining the next step in a non-random way that more often than not achieves the desired outcome faster than random parameter selection would.

I see the stratojump as just that - pushing the limits of human fitness and achievements. It's cool and it's awesome. In the same way that some of the awesome Olympic athleticism and the world's biggest pizza are cool. Not in the same way that me and some guy working at a bench on the other side of world who doesn't speak my language and has never met me will converge to the same results for the relative weights of various molecules by using a universal decision-making system. And both of us are getting the same results as an alien on the other side of the universe. The cool thing about science is the universality of it as a decision-making system and the utility of it over random experimentation. What we achieve using scientific approaches can be awesome or terrible. Just as what we achieve through religion can be awesome or terrible.