Sonic Skydive's Real Aim Is To Help Astronauts Survive 140
mattnyc99 writes "Earlier this year came reports that Felix Baumgartner (the daredevil who flew across the English Channel) would be attempting to jump from a balloon at least 120,000 feet altitude, break the sound barrier, and live. Now comes a big investigative story from Esquire's issue on achieving the impossible, which details the former NASA team dedicated to making sure Baumgartner's Stratos project will instruct the future safety of manned space flight (including Jonathan Clark, the husband of an astronaut who died in the Columbia disaster). From the article (which also includes pics and video shot by the amateur space photographer we've discussed here before): 'that's also precisely what makes Stratos great. It's more like Mercury than the shuttle: They're taking risks, making things up as they go along. But they're also doing important work, potentially groundbreaking work. They're doing what NASA no longer has the balls to do. Hell, he'd do it for free. He is doing it for free. Stratos only picks up his travel expenses. Clark looks at his friend, shrugs. "This is new space."'"
Re:Red Bull, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
For another great moment in skydiving/Red Bull history check out this video [youtube.com] of Travis Pastrana. I heard he got banned for life by the USPA for this stunt. Apparently its illegal in the US to exit an airplane without a parachute.
Doing what NASA won't - don't make me laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
"They're doing what NASA no longer has the balls to do."
It's not like an astronaut will be stepping out of a spacecraft at 100kft, he'll be burnt to a crisp and mangled by the air blast as his craft will still have considerable speed at that altitude.
If he's doing a personal (individual) recovery as suggested by another poster, then the astronaut will be riding in a small capsule and parachutes for slowing down small capsules are a long solved problem.
In short, with regards to space safety, this is pretty much a meaningless stunt as it has nothing in common with any but the most far fetched of scenarios.
Re:Two Separate Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Orbital speed is ~mach 21. Heat shields are pretty well established technology. Early spy satellites dropped film containers which were collected on Earth. Then there was Mercury up to Apollo. The Galileo entry probe hit Jupiter at 50 km/s (~mach 150).
So you can pretty much dial your own heat shield now. The problem is that it is going to be bulky. For a two metre human I expect you will need a conical structure ~3 metres in diameter and about a metre deep. Rockets and guidance will be needed if you need to deorbit. If the aerobraking is unguided then you will pull serious gees, but not enough to be fatal.
I don't think the parachute system is much of an issue. You are gong to be down to terminal velocity close to the ground anyway. Just fire the chute at 10km altitude.
Re:Not quite... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going to post something similar if I didn't find a comment like this.
The problem--well, not the only problem, but a big one--is horizontal velocity (as in across the map and not downwards). Imagine how much propellant--even in space--it would take to accelerate you to 14,000 mph (or whatever the actual orbital velocity is--wikipedia puts the ISS at 17,000 mph). If you want to get back down to zero velocity relative to the ground, you have to have that same amount of propellant, along with steering thrusters of some kind and enough computers to make sure you're pointed in directly the right way to cancel out your existing momentum without adding new vectors. Since you probably can't fit that all on a suit of any kind, you are now looking at a capsule, and if you are looking at a capsule, there aren't a whole lot of good reasons not to simply have a normal re-entry capsule, which instead of wasting space on tons of reaction mass or fuel, simply has room for the people, radio, shielding, parachutes, etc.
And weight is ALWAYS a big issue. It has always been. More weight means more fuel use on the launchpad, plus more fuel for EVERY maneuver you do, and extra fuel itself means more weight. More fuel needed than what your rocket can handle means either a second launch or a bigger class of rocket, or you scrap the project.
So I'm pretty sure that you can't get from orbital to stationary jumps feasibly. And if you want to reenter at orbital speeds... well... again we come back to how much propellant you'd need to slow down to a stop, or even to a controllable 60-100mph; you have to absorb that same amount of energy with whatever suit or capsule you put the dude in. And you have to worry about other things, like trajectory. I bet you're a lot more likely to skip off the atmosphere at those speeds in a suit than in a heavy object like a space shuttle.
Re:Two Separate Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this potentially a good experiment for a microsat payload? Inflate something and wait for the drag to decay the orbit, then re-enter. It seems to me it might be in the range of a college or amateur team, or AMSAT.
It sounds like the Russians haven't had a fully successful recovery in three tries. But I may be citing a different sort of project.
Re:Not quite... (Score:4, Interesting)
Other than the fact that the type of casualty which would lead to the need for this kind of escape system is such a far fetched edge case that you might as well stock holy water, garlic, and a gun with silver bullets as well...
Wihch would you rather have: a big hole in your shuttle heat shield and no chance of surviving, or a big hole in your shuttle heat shield and seven MOOSE packs in a locker that give you some chance of surviving?
Because while you can probably spare a few hundred kilos for emergency survival, you sure aren't going to carry an escape capsule which can bring your whole crew back to Earth in comfort, just in case it's needed.
Re:Two Separate Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but we know that there were survivors from the initial explosion of the fuel tank on Challenger. If they had been in a position to bail out, there is still no guarantee they would have survived any internal injuries received at that point, or debris impacts after bailing out, but it is within the bounds of possibility that the death toll on that specific tragedy would not have been quite so great.
The other possibility to consider is what happens if any future manned mission is stranded in space, with damage too great for repairs and no possibility of rescue within the time the capsule or whatever can remain in orbit. I seem to remember a case of a Russian astronaut being (temporarily) stranded in space after a malfunction, with NASA being incapable of offering help due to the time it would take to launch a rescue. The ability to descend safely would only require that the vehicle decelerate sufficiently. Even if that meant dropping like a stone immediately after, so long as the astronaut could get out in time, that would be no big deal.
Re:Two Separate Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Two Separate Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah thats the fluffy reentry vehicle. Cometary dust grains get into our atmosphere that way because their surface area is large compared to their volume and mass. Unfortunately they also decelerate at hundreds of gravities, which is not going to be good for your passengers.
I do think, however, that large devices which generate drag could be used to passively deorbit rescue craft. You could use this if your retro rockets fail. If you had a very light canopy (say a few molecules thick) you could grab on to the thin atmosphere at 300 km altitude and drop your orbital altitude in a day or two.
Re:Two Separate Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Yes, JD is an old-timer. But the funny thing is that I knew about Slashdot for months, Debian guys were talking about it, etc., and I refrained from showing up there. Finally something made me do it. If I hadn't done that, I'd probably be in the three digit UID club.
Well, I did get credit for some other stuff :-)