this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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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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[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 6 hours ago (10 children)

The answer to this depends on how much the magic device with the oxygen weighs.

Also just going to set aside anything to do with sky diving and space suits and having friends and everything else that I don't know anything about.

I only know this from playing Simple Rockets on android but basically you direct your thrust in the direction you're moving in order to reduce your velocity, and you'll fall down to earth.

Think of an orbit as the balance between falling towards earth and zipping past earth. If you fly past too fast then you just fly past and maybe the gravity pulls you a bit but not much. If you fly past too slow the gravity pulls you down to earth and you crash. If you fly past at the same speed you fall towards earth the two directions balance out and you end up just spinning around earth.

Therefore, If you're in a stable orbit on the space station, and then you slow down, you'll start to fall down towards it instead of "falling" around it in an orbit.

If you only slow down a little bit you'll start moving towards Earth but you'll be moving way too fast for an unshielded human to enter the atmosphere without burning up.

You'd have to slow yourself down, by directing thrust towards the horizon you're headed towards, enough so that you're not going fast enough to burn up.

Whether or not you can slow down enough, quickly enough, depends on how much thrust your magic device can provide and how much that device makes you weigh.

[–] DancingBear@midwest.social 1 points 6 hours ago (7 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?

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

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