Monday, November 08, 2004
Do you yell, or do you scream when jumping out of space? |9:46 PM| I wanted to make the same jump as one Joseph Kittinger, who during the course PROJECT EXCELSIOR
"jumped from a height of 102,800 feet, almost 20 miles above the earth. With only the small stabilizing chute deployed, Kittinger fell for 4 minutes, 36 seconds. He experienced temperatures as low as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit and a maximum speed of 714 miles per hour, exceeding the speed of sound."
Hell, you could curse up a storm and hear it when you slowed down.
But what would the point be? I then thought about the recent X-prize victories, and the possibility of commerical space flight. Sure, they're all keen on getting up there, but what if something goes wrong and you need a ticket home?
I'd be more than willing to help finance and develop an ejection system, so long as I was the first human test subject to ride it back.
A bunch of authors, fiction and non, have postulated and proposed some ways of getting back home. The design I saw a lot was a kind of coned disc, that you deploy, lie "down" on, and grab the little rocket motor.
Line it up for re-entry, and then hope the heat shield doesn't break, or flip over, or skip you off the thicker bits of the atmosphere and send you towards a horrific (and I imagine boring) deep space death by suffocation.
Enter, the MOOSE
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/moose_000923.html
Now THAT'S ballsy.
If you're at all interested in stuff like this, take a look at this link:
http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/rescue.htm
Things of note:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/paracone.htm
"Oooh boy, I hope my space trousers have sufficient heat rejection capacity, they clearly have sufficient crap-rejection ability!"
No parachute required? That's some confidence in the design. Imagine that you're the first guy using one. You managed to escape a spacecraft that was completely screwed, braved the radiation, lined up your trip home, got through the atmosphere, only to become rasberry paste on impact.
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/reseball.htm
During my searching for info, I found this site:
http://www.canadianarrow.com/spacediving.htm
They had better links to information, and they beat me to the idea by some time. Not to say that I expected to be the first guy who wanted to roll down the window of an orbiter, throw up the horns and scream "I REGRET NOTHING" while diving head first towards earth.
Do you yell, or do you scream when jumping out of space? |9:46 PM| I wanted to make the same jump as one Joseph Kittinger, who during the course PROJECT EXCELSIOR
"jumped from a height of 102,800 feet, almost 20 miles above the earth. With only the small stabilizing chute deployed, Kittinger fell for 4 minutes, 36 seconds. He experienced temperatures as low as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit and a maximum speed of 714 miles per hour, exceeding the speed of sound."
Hell, you could curse up a storm and hear it when you slowed down.
But what would the point be? I then thought about the recent X-prize victories, and the possibility of commerical space flight. Sure, they're all keen on getting up there, but what if something goes wrong and you need a ticket home?
I'd be more than willing to help finance and develop an ejection system, so long as I was the first human test subject to ride it back.
A bunch of authors, fiction and non, have postulated and proposed some ways of getting back home. The design I saw a lot was a kind of coned disc, that you deploy, lie "down" on, and grab the little rocket motor.
Line it up for re-entry, and then hope the heat shield doesn't break, or flip over, or skip you off the thicker bits of the atmosphere and send you towards a horrific (and I imagine boring) deep space death by suffocation.
Enter, the MOOSE
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/moose_000923.html
Now THAT'S ballsy.
If you're at all interested in stuff like this, take a look at this link:
http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/rescue.htm
Things of note:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/paracone.htm
Heat loads were calculated to be within the heat rejection capacity of the astronaut's portable life support system. A ballistic re-entry followed, with a peak of 9.6 G's. No parachute was required.
"Oooh boy, I hope my space trousers have sufficient heat rejection capacity, they clearly have sufficient crap-rejection ability!"
No parachute required? That's some confidence in the design. Imagine that you're the first guy using one. You managed to escape a spacecraft that was completely screwed, braved the radiation, lined up your trip home, got through the atmosphere, only to become rasberry paste on impact.
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/reseball.htm
I would also like to point out that several of the designs specify "No abort option". For crying out loud, you're jumping out of a goddamn SPACESHIP, and you intend to plummet out of goddamn OUTER SPACE, who the hell would expect to be able to, at some point, say "Nah, I think I'll try my chances with the tumbling wreckage of the ship I just bailed out of." What the hell would the abort option be? A big ladder?
A tiny window was provided to prevent total sensory deprivation. It is said that when they were in use, astronaut candidates would be asked to get in one. After fifteen minutes or so, the candidate was asked how long they thought they had been in. If the candidate was not hysterical and guessed anything under an hour, they passed!
During my searching for info, I found this site:
http://www.canadianarrow.com/spacediving.htm
They had better links to information, and they beat me to the idea by some time. Not to say that I expected to be the first guy who wanted to roll down the window of an orbiter, throw up the horns and scream "I REGRET NOTHING" while diving head first towards earth.
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