Asklemmy

45254 readers

1103 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

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 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by DancingBear@midwest.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

29 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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 6 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 6 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 2 points 5 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.