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?
It seems difficult to have enough bottled oxygen to deorbit yourself, but maybe doable.
The MMU backpack units on the space shuttle had a total delta v of ~30 m/s. You need about three times that amount to deorbit from ISS. So imagine you need 3 MMUs give it take worth of expendable propellant oxygen, and you can do it. (The MMUs used nitrogen, but for this purpose oxygen is pretty much the same.)
After you deorbit, you will of course burn up on re-entry with no heat shield. But it might be conceivable to design a personal heat shield surfboard.
You could also avoid the whole burning up things by braking a lot more during the deorbit maneuver. But instead of 100 m/s, you need to slow down by more than 7000 m/s. That’s quite a few more MMUs worth of gas. But if you do that, then you’re essentially making a free fall jump from space, which has more or less already been demonstrated.
Edit:
To address the linked article in some way: each astronaut on the station has a dedicated seat on a capsule to come back down in an emergency. Usually, it’s the same space capsule you came up on, but not always. Those are maintained ready to go at all times, and the astronauts can be back on the ground in 60 minutes whenever they need to. These spacecraft can be operated to splashdown by astronauts alone with no ground assistance, if needed.
What is it that makes you “burn up” on reentry? Is any of that avoided if you can decelerate yourself from going sideways… apologies I don’t know what to call it but you are like a baseball at that point going sideways across the yard relative to flat ground on earth I think.
Edit: that’s really cool though if you are saying we only need a few backpacks of oxygen to burn ourselves up though
It’s friction with the air.
You’ve experienced a strong guest of wind, now multiply that by 700x. At some point the temperature of the air is meaningless. The impact of you on those air particles gives them soo much energy they get white hot and radiate heat as energy, thereby heating you up. Like standing next to a fire.
The energy that makes you burn up is your own kinetic energy. The “small” deorbit burn slows you down just enough to touch the atmosphere, but you’re still going nearly full speed: 7200 m/s. Around 30,000 km/hr.
If you slow down more in space, so that you enter the atmosphere at low speed, you don’t burn up. But you need a whole lot more backpacks to handle the full speed. It’s cheaper and burns less gas if you use the air to slow down.
Do rockets aim straight up as they try to leave earth, why don’t they burn up on exit too
By the time they’re going fast enough, they’re high enough they don’t have much air to worry about. (And they do have an angle over too, not just straight up)
Missiles do go more or less go straight though the atmosphere horizontally. Most are slower than what we’re taking about, but hypersonic missiles get close to rocket speeds. And they do need big heat shields to keep from melting immediately.
Rockets do not aim straight up when they are leaving. They go straight up for a few seconds, and then they tilt over in the desired direction to pickup speed.
They don’t burn up on the launch because they time the tilt over maneuver so that they get above nearly all of the atmosphere before they start picking up serious speed.