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

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] untorquer@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

No. Jumping forward increases your elevation at the far orbit. Jumping back decreases it. But you'd end up back on where you jumped in one orbit either way.

[–] Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 9 hours ago

The intersection point of your orbit would be fixed in space, but because you have added or removed energy from yourself, your orbital period will be slightly different. When you come back around, the station will be a little bit ahead or behind where it was last orbit.

With each subsequent orbit, this gap would grow until you're on completely opposite sides of the planet at the intersection point, and then it would shrink. Eventually, the difference would come back around to zero and you would hit the station.

In theory, anyway. In reality, perturbations in your and the ISS' orbits would almost ensure you never hit it again for a very long time, if ever.