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?
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.
The weight of the device let’s say is 20 bananas and so that makes 2 fit astronauts and a stoner. Nobody knows why the stoner was on the space station to begin with.
Americans will truly use anything but the metric system
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?
The issue here is that the ISS is travelling about 17,500 mph. Even if you somehow stopped yourself immediately (watch The Expanse to see what happens what happens when someone traveling very fast sudden comes to a complete stop) I think you would be falling too fast by the time you hit the atmosphere to fall safely. Heat starts being an issue over mach 1 and you’ll be moving much fast than that. An unshielded astronaut suit would burn up quite fast in those conditions.
Would it help if the station was in geosynchronous orbit
Then it would be even higher up and you would be going even faster on re-entry
Nope. You would hit the atmosphere moving even faster
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.
Minor nitpick, it’s not friction, its compression. The air can’t move out of your way fast enough, so you push it ahead of you, and as more air gets smooshed together, it gets hotter.
I think it would be cold I don’t know would a human size piece of space debris burn up?
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.
If you fell straight down from the height of the orbit of the ISS, by the time you reached the thicker parts of the atmosphere, you would be travelling at around 2 km/s. Unprotected, this is enough energy to raise your temperature by 500 °C, but not all of that energy would actually go into you so you would be a little bit cooler. But suffice it to say, if you have to get off the ISS without a capsule, you’re cooked.