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If you had to jump off of the space station with with your friends, and all you could bring with you were your spacesuits, parachutes for each of you, and you had a magic device that had enough oxygen (midwest.social)

submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) by DancingBear@midwest.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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for you to survive the journey. If you could somehow spray the oxygen to get you close enough to Earth to use the parachute and land safely, how would you do it?

Edit: and how much oxygen would it take to spray, would you need to use to oxygen to slow your decent? This is assuming the amount of oxygen you have would be the same amount required before you naturally deorbited like a junk satellite or something. So like, you don’t have any food so you wouldn’t make it that long, but that’s how much oxygen you magically have…. Could you make it out alive? And how?

Edit 2: one of you has a cool clipboard and space pen that astronauts have that you can do math with.

Edit 3: one of you is a stoner.

Edit 4: if the space station was in geosynchronous orbit, could an astronaut jump down off of it?

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[–] DancingBear@midwest.social 1 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

If you fall straight down so I guess that means straight down is still like 24000 mph or whatever the earth is rotating… but if you slow yourself down would you still burn up?

[–] jewbacca117@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

The issue here is that the ISS is travelling about 17,500 mph. Even if you somehow stopped yourself immediately (watch The Expanse to see what happens what happens when someone traveling very fast sudden comes to a complete stop) I think you would be falling too fast by the time you hit the atmosphere to fall safely. Heat starts being an issue over mach 1 and you'll be moving much fast than that. An unshielded astronaut suit would burn up quite fast in those conditions.

[–] DancingBear@midwest.social 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Would it help if the station was in geosynchronous orbit

[–] TheWeirdestCunt@lemm.ee 4 points 11 hours ago

Then it would be even higher up and you would be going even faster on re-entry

[–] jewbacca117@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago

Nope. You would hit the atmosphere moving even faster

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

The only reason things burn up when they enter the atmosphere is because they're moving so fast that the friction from the air generates too much heat.

So yes, if you slow yourself down enough then you could just float down like a feather in the wind.

I have no idea how fast is too fast.

[–] DancingBear@midwest.social 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I think it would be cold I don’t know would a human size piece of space debris burn up?

[–] SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz 3 points 10 hours ago

Everything burns up regardless of size. Big things might not finish burning by the time they hit the ground.

You need either enough thrust to slow you to ~mach 2, or a heat shield to do the same by aerobraking.

It's called aerobraking for a reason: you're using friction to turn kinetic energy into heat to slow down, but that heat goes into the air and your heat shield instead of brake pads and rotors.

[–] Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

If you fell straight down from the height of the orbit of the ISS, by the time you reached the thicker parts of the atmosphere, you would be travelling at around 2 km/s. Unprotected, this is enough energy to raise your temperature by 500 °C, but not all of that energy would actually go into you so you would be a little bit cooler. But suffice it to say, if you have to get off the ISS without a capsule, you're cooked.