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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 10 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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[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 hours ago

You're going much too fast to hit the earth, you'll miss it and continue in orbit. To deorbit, you'll need a lot of things to throw in the other direction, like the oxygen from your magic tank. You'd need about a full rocket full of oxygen (~170 tons) to slow down, probably more because the exit velocity would be slower than a rocket.

The other issue with this scheme is you'd slow down too slowly. You'll start getting slower and lower, but you'd start to get into the atmosphere, which because you're still going so fast would cause you to not have a great time. So your magic oxygen bottle will also need a massive tube off the end of it, maybe a couple meters in diameter.

But if you had your magic infinite air tank with a huge tube off it, theoretically you could get back down to earth safely with just it, a space suit, and a parachute.