why would you need that? An astronaut is in the most hostile environment possible. If they wanted to die, theyâd just need to open their suit and theyâll be dead quicker then you can say âasphyxiationâ.
I need to see it again⌠Havenât seen it since I was a kid on some late night movie presentation â the image of burning up as surfing into the atmosphere has always stuck with me.
a spacewalking suit weighs 280# to 310# on Earth, mostly in the backpack and body. there is negligible weight in space, but of course there is still mass. basically, think of a 400# man-sized cylinder with two pop-out arms of, at most, 50# total mass.
envelope math says that, generously, youâll at most double your moment of inertia, which would halve your angular velocity, which probably wonât be very comforting. really, i think it would be much less, maybe at most adding a tenth, which would knock ~10% off your rotational velocity. there just isnât much mass in your arms to matter (no pun intended), despite the squared torque term.
added: more sketchy envelope math says 1/10 is about right.
sudden decompression will kill you, but itâd be a pretty miserable ~15 seconds before you black out.
i donât know exactly how (if?) suits vent, but if the choice is immediate decompression or a, hopefully, more gradual passing out from mere hypoxia, iâd go for the latter. unless maybe the rotation makes me vomit in my suit. ugh.
Talk about first world problemsâŚ
Take heart. Someday there will be justice in this world, and the underprivileged and disadvantaged alike will enjoy the freedom to plummet to a cold, airless death in the vacuum of space.
For lo: âBlessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the empty, lightless, vast, and uncaring gulf between the stars.â
âMatthew 5:3
hey, they were second world problems too, until it ceased to exist.
Just to alleviate bad dreams, I think it is safe to say that your companion who has plenty of tethers and a rocket ship with thrusters, will not just sit there in the cockpit watching you dwindle away for 7.5 hours. Also you are probably moving away pretty slowly. You could throw a hammer away from you to get back, or your partner could lasso you with a tether, throw you some things you could then throw away farther, etc. Hardest thing to handle is I suppose spin, which might be solved by carrying a bag of steel balls with you⌠I can imagine lots of emergency preparedness things that might be useful. So donât worry about it. That said there is are some cool sequences in a manga (PLANETES I think) where astronauts in LEO kick (physically with their legs) trash into lower orbit where they quickly burn up, and one person is saved by someone on a rocket trike.
In this scene people are working somewhat far apart from each other in LEO to clean up trash, the dangerous part of which is when a big swarm of metal scrap is suddenly seen to be on a vector with you at high velocity. Thatâs why you need to carry some delta-V with you. Ah yes, it was Planetes and it seems to be also an animated series too. Here is a cool English trailer on Youtube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DakRYsUIiIE It shows a lot of use of thrusters and the guys at NASA ought to watch it.
Ha! Quite right.
Actually, Iâm pretty sure that already belongs to Azathoth. Though, being something less, and other, than sentient, he might be OK with sharing.
Radiolab - in their Darkness of Space? episode interviewed an astronaut, recounting a harrowing experience of being unable to re-enter the space station and the danger of boiling alive as the space suits cooling system shut down.
Maybe itâs just the sin of âfailure of imaginationâ but I canât see what use a suicide pill would be to the sort of person whoâd go up there. They donât go up there or out there to kill themselves, unless thereâs real excruciating pain with no prospect of its ending - which I understand is not the case here. Even when you know the physics of your doom, youâd maybe still hope of some magic Hollywoodian rescue and it would be damn silly to prematurely remove yourself from such, given that the alternative is just going to sleep and not waking up.
How about reading the article? It´s not that long.
Isnât there a Soyuz docked with the ISS all the time? Couldnât that be used as a rescue craft? I had the impression that the work module could double up as an airlock, and even if it couldnât it ought to be able to catch up with a falling astronaut and bring them back in pretty short order.
If all else fails simply consider yourself a gift to the universe. Your freeze-dried corpse may one day become proof to an alien civilization of other intelligent life.
well, astronauts do load up on anti motion sickness pills so thatâs not as likely an issue, but drowning in your own vomit is a possibility.
Possibly, but fucking hard to do. Remember, that the majority of docking and so forth is automated and there is no easy way to look out of a window and navigate in the Soyuz.
I suppose as a last resort they might just try it.
No. To de-orbit, you must aim your jet pack against your trajectory.
Also:
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The chances that an accident will cause enough change in velocity to de-orbit you and not be great enough to kill you are slim.
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If you came loose from your spacecraft, then every 90 minutes or so, you would have a close encounter with it and have the opportunity to be rescued.
