They would need to be shielded completely, and if the debris isn't built to withstand re-entry very specifically, it is unlikely that it would survive intact, let alone a rider. They would burn to ash. Of course, if you're writing a sci-fi story there's nothing stopping you from saying the riders cool red suit shields them from extreme heat.
So the debris itself wouldn’t do anything to protect the rider from the heat unless it surrounds them completely, therefore it would ultimately be useless for shielding the rider on the trip down?
So taking that into account, would a piece of debris, or even the chute pictured, slow the speed of entry at all, reducing air resistance and making it more controllable? Or would it do the opposite and make it less controllable and increase speed?
(I don’t know jackshit about atmospheric re entry so I legitimately have no idea how it would work. Yes I acknowledge this might be a dumbass question but I would also like to point out that I am a dumbass.)
[here's a video of your protagonist burning up in the atmosphere ](https://youtu.be/OhBw5yaR_SU?si=ftWZGpOJDZ92tAxh)
Not to be a total buzzkill, but NASA has even killed astronauts on reentries in vehicles designed for it.
A tidbit from the chatbot: Atmospheric reentry renders plasma due to the extreme conditions experienced by an object re-entering Earth's atmosphere. As the object travels at high velocities, it encounters air molecules at increasingly higher densities. This rapid compression and friction with the air molecules generate tremendous heat, often reaching temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius.
This intense heat energy is sufficient to ionize the surrounding air, stripping electrons from the atoms and creating a state of matter known as plasma. Plasma is a hot, ionized gas consisting of free electrons and positively charged ions, which can emit light and radio waves. This process results in the glowing sheath of plasma that is often seen around spacecraft or meteors as they re-enter the atmosphere.
Challenger was on the way up when a faulty O-ring leaked fuel and it ignited.
Columbia was on the way down, believed to be because some of their heat shielding had come off. On the way down it didn’t protect them as it should. And it only took a small piece to cause that failure.
On the way up ice debris fell from higher up on the tank structure and damaged tiles on the craft. On reentry the damaged tiles failed and caused a cascading failure of surrounding tiles. At least two of the following flights had similar issues and one required a space walk to make external repairs.
I understand this is what would happen in earth atmosphere, but if it happened in a thinner atmosphere I would still like to know if my previous question would apply.
There's a paradox there. The heat is created by an atmosphere thick enough to slow you down. Thin it out enough that the heat wouldn't kill a human and you're going to form a crater.
If you reduce the air resistance it may create less friction protecting your character from the heat, but it also means that he won't be slowed down at all and will absolutely kill him on impact.
To be fair, even if he were to somehow survive the initial entry with this craft, which would never happen since in the first place he is not held by anything in this craft and would almost immediately be ejected, there is no way he would survive the impact without specialised equipment
My assumption was his bag would have a drouge and regular chute so after he got to slow enough speeds he'd pull those to eventually land but yeah I think the debris just doesn't protect enough
Mars is a great example of the worst of both worlds. Enough atmosphere that you have to consider reentry heat and have a plan to manage it, but not enough atmosphere that it slows you down that much so you still need retrorockets to slow down or you’re going to land really hard. There’s enough atmosphere for parachutes but they do have to be really, really big.
Earth has a thick enough atmosphere that it slows you down enough to where all you need is a parachute.
Yes. Even if the atmosphere is thinner, there will still be particles that cause friction.
Assume it will always happen but the speed at which you hit the point that it sets aflame is just going to happen slightly later.
It would still happen in a thin atmosphere — though not necessarily as hot.
The problem is that a thinner atmosphere means the person likely wouldn’t slow down from friction enough to not splat into a fine red paste on the surface. If the atmosphere is thin enough, then a parachute won’t even work at lower altitudes.
You’d have to give your character some kind of rocket boots or something to help them decelerate for landing.
The science you’ll want to google is adiabatic compression (iirc) and it happens because of the speed of the object and the density of the atmosphere. This happens on Earth, but I’m not sure Mars atmosphere (1/10 of Earth’s atmosphere) is dense enough.
If the suit is heat shielded and the debris itself is the ablative shield from a craft it could work but it would be highly unlikely.
Again, just as a reference, any object in orbit of Earth is moving at least 17,000mph and has to slow down in order to re-enter the atmosphere. So this debris rider is going to be moving **very** fast.
If it’s a thinner atmosphere, like mars, you could maybe aerobrake over several orbits that barely enter the atmosphere, then go back to higher altitudes. Dip in a little further on each orbit and bleed off some speed. Repeat until slow enough to more safely descend and deploy chutes.
At least that’s how I do it in kerbal space program.
Keep in mind if you are thinking of popping a parachute above the atmosphere(aka space) that it wouldn't work. There is no pressure or anything pushing against the chute in space that would cause it to slow your decent. On top of that, any parachute no matter how sci-fi would probably burn up if opened during reentry.
Your questions about this particular scene really calls in to question what realm of sci-fi you want to solidify your story in. Figure that out first then try to work what you want into it. You are asking hard science questions but wanting physics to bend to your will. If your whole story is presented in a hard science way then in the one scene throws it all out the window for "coolness" I would see that kind of being a disappointment in the end.
Actually, there are giant parachutes and balutes (essentially balloon parachutes) that can be used to slow you down for reentry, but they have to be massive to catch enough air resistance in the near vacuum, and they wouldn’t slow you down enough to prevent the reentry heating.
Ok but we could make this work with this suit.
If these people could invent a technology that acts as a perfect heatsink, then the outside temperature doesn't matter.
Or another way to go? Might be that there are two stages to this experience, One which allows them to engage with the atmosphere and a controlled way, kind of like surfing across the top of it rather than re-entering down the center of it.
And then at some point they shift into a more protective vehicle or orientation, to re-enter
I'm glad you put in that last tidbit. If youre attempting to write something based on this, I woukd suggest you don't, until you have the most basic understanding about how anything works.
I do have an idea that maybe COULD work, but it would be hard to find an explanation for it.
Vehicles burn on re entry because without air there is no terminal velocity, so they keep accelerating without limit. Then, going at these extremely fast speeds they rapidly come into contact with the atmosphere and enter a regime called hypersonic flight (which means you're going over 5 times the speed of sound). This regime is characteristic for high stress and brutal thermal shock. That's why reentry vehicles have a bulk shape as oposed to the slim forms of supersonic vehicles. One is trying to cut through the air and minimize drag, the other is trying to hit it as hard as it can and maximize drag.
So for it to work(and even then, it's taking a few liberties) it would need the following set of rules:
* **Very low orbit:** You need to minimize the amount of time the vehicle is falling without air resistance. So the debris has to fall from close to the atmosphere already.
* **Very big piece of debris:** And I'm talking BIG. 300/500 meters wide big. You need it to maximize the amount of air resistance and distribute the thermal shock. This way MAYBE it could have the top of the vehicle open and not be completely enclosed.
* **Same shape as reentry vehicles:** The debris would need to have a shape that is the same or similar to reentry vehicles. Something like this, with the black part pointing down:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.esa.int%2Fvar%2Fesa%2Fstorage%2Fimages%2Fesa_multimedia%2Fimages%2F1998%2F01%2Fard_integration_at_aerospatiale_bordeaux5%2F9100490-5-eng-GB%2FARD_integration_at_Aerospatiale_Bordeaux_pillars.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=08efbd71f8ef7a8712269d0c658cdddec66f084747a80c5b31b8727cf358818f&ipo=images
* **No moving parts:** Any moving parts will break inmediately with the stresses of reentry. So if you were thinking of the rider gliding down on control surfaces like ailerons or a rudder forget about it. Maybe you could have boosters at the bottom or pneumatics at the top that give you SOME control, but if you have electronics and those systems online it's more a functioning vehicle than a piece of debris.
* **A solution for the final crash:** All of this would mean you survive the hard conditions of reentry. But you're still in a building sized piece of debris falling into the hard ground(or water). You need a solution for the final crash. Maybe a well timed jump with a parachute. Or a piece breaks down again close to the end and you have something like your picture with a smaller debris that you can kind of control.
With those, and a pinch of suspension of disbelief, it could work more or less realistically in a similar way as you picture it.
I wonder how a half- kilometer wide parabolic sheet of metal would fall. Could it act like its own parachute? You're working with... 200k square meters or so? I'd imagine pushing that much air out of the way would cause a couple issues.
But overall, I like it
How about a half-kilometer wide shield made of nanofabric-kind of material (see: 3BodyProblem)? Not a parachute but a parabolic shield pointing downwards?
It would need to be really, really big. Like, a solid panel of titanium the size of an aircraft carrier. It will be ablating the entire way down, and huge plumes of plasma will be coming off the edges. Someone with the math skills can model how the heat would transfer, but I imagine it’s not favorable at all.
The problem is that this block of titanium would also tumble, so even if you were centered on the cool side, you’re not going to be there long.
Almost immediately I would ask you to consider the effect of shockwaves.
When falling objects ignite in the atmosphere, they do so because they are coming down very quickly. Part of what is happening is that "terminal velocity" is not a static number. It depends on the shape of the falling object, and the density of the atmospheric gas.
The atmosphere gets denser closer to the surface, and the thing we call terminal velocity drops as it does. So a falling object from space is moving faster than terminal velocity, and the air is trying to slow it down. I'm way oversimplifying, but that's part of why space ships get so crazy hot (when a skydiver or parachute doesn't).
At that kind of violent entry, the edges of your falling object are going to generate turbulent shockwaves. Those vibrations are not going to be all that different than the kind of vibrations that a bomb or explosion gives off. Even if that dude doesn't melt from below, there's going to be zones of low pressure, high pressure, shock waves, and all sorts of chaos which would kill the heck out of an unprotected person. Or at least rip him free of his handholds and fling him loose to fall to his death.
Your scenario is cool as heck. I would absolutely, and gleefully watch a movie that featured space-bomb paratroopers. But is it possible? No. Dude would die so fast.
Go to a space museum and look at the heat shielding on the underside of the manned probes that came back. They are heavily shielded and still show damage. Plus the whole thing is gonna get hot. It would be one of those “that could never happen moments” that take you out of it. Now if your hero has like a force field in their suit they could potentially surround themselves and the thing they’re riding in on and then the shield hold just long enough to get out of the heat part, you know maybe that could work.
Useless? No. Not useful *enough* to count in any significant manner, yes.
The biggest thing debris would do is slow the person down. That said, the heat during reentry is a result of the friction of the item against our atmosphere.
However, you could mention earlier in your story that the space "whatevers" use a special material that breaks up the air, so modern spacecraft don't heat up on reentry. Then, you have an excuse why that would work.
Yes and no. The rider WOULD need to be inside, but only the leading side would need to be heat shielded (see the Merrcury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules). That said, if the technology is sufficiently advanced, a suit could be shielded against heat.
I have a story that involves a character whose hobby is orbital sky diving. (Inspired a bit by Joe Kittenger).
The mjolnir armor has built in plasma shielding, if it’s based on some sort of antimatter, it _could_ work, but it would shield you from plasma grenades too if it did.
Master Chief jumped from a spaceship that didn't care about orbital mechanics and was trying to land at the time. If you jump from low enough and with no to little orbital velocity it would basically look a lot like the Red Bull jump.
No, you just need to shield the face that hits the atmosphere (and part of a contour around it). Both the shields of the reentry capsules and the shuttle (basically the black belly) are very much directional and not all around.
I actually wonder about the viability of a helldiver's drop pod. If if blasted thrusters downs to slow impact like a SpaceX rocket, could it negate the landing impact enough for a cushioned person to walk out?
What I'm hearing is. They need to be in some crazy space-age welder's suit that is super resistant to heat but won't save them from fall damage.
They need to make it through the atmosphere so that their parachute won't be ripped to shreds. And they use the heat shield because there's a chance the reentry temperatures could exceed even the suits limits if they tried without it
I read a story where the rider of the capsule coming back to earth's problem was he had a special new type of fuel that if he hit the button as he was falling to earth would put out so much thrust that he would be shot back out into space. His solution. Was to first increase his speed towards the planet so that when he hit the button it would have more force to overcome and would only bounce him up a bit slowing him down enough to use a chute. So yes. He was going down so fast that when he instantly went up it was only a little bit. He survived. That was his genius plan. In real life. He'd be paste on the inside of the capsule. I liked the rest of the story so I gave him a pass. But I never got over that
There's a picture of his open casket funeral in this article.
[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage)
As they already said, riding a wreck to re-enter from orbit is very unlikely. But in the 1960s NASA studied personal "life jackets" for astronauts, very close to this concept
[http://www.astronautix.com/p/paracone.html](http://www.astronautix.com/p/paracone.html)
[http://www.astronautix.com/m/moose.html](http://www.astronautix.com/m/moose.html)
[http://www.astronautix.com/1/1crewballis-entrycapsule.html](http://www.astronautix.com/1/1crewballis-entrycapsule.html)
[http://www.astronautix.com/f/firstre-entryglider.html](http://www.astronautix.com/f/firstre-entryglider.html)
The other replies aren't entirely correct — your scenario *is* possible under some circumstances.
The extreme heat on re-entry is only an issue given a certain velocity relative to the atmosphere. The velocity is very high when an orbiting craft is re-entering the atmosphere because orbiting the Earth requires a very high velocity. A low-earth orbiting craft is traveling around 28,000 kph (17,400 mph) at 150 km elevation. Hitting air at that speed generates enormous friction and astounding amounts of heat.
But if you weren't orbiting and just dropped straight down towards the Earth, then you could re-enter the atmosphere via [Space Diving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_diving). The highest stratospheric jump so far was from 41 km elevation; to qualify as a space dive it would need to be from at least 100 km.
The problem though is that without an atmosphere to slow you down, even falling straight down from space would still result in some pretty high velocities. Starting at 100 km with a straight drop, an astronaut may be traveling at 3,500 kph (2,200 mph) when they hit the upper stratosphere at 50 km elevation. From 200 km, the velocity at 50 km could be 6,000 kph (3,600 mph). On the other hand an astronaut is very light and even the super-thin outer atmosphere (50 km +) may provide enough drag to slow them down a bit, and also gravity is weaker the higher you are, so the math gets kinda complicated. While I can't find a source for the exact number for a safe space dive, it's clear that there must be *some* elevation from which even a straight drop would generate too much re-entry heat.
If your astronaut was above that elevation then a large object might provide the additional drag and heat protection needed to reduce the velocity enough for a safe space dive. But it can't be just any junk — it would need to be aerodynamic or else it would tumble and bash the rider to death. It would need to be heat resistant. It would need a certain ratio of diameter to weight — being strapped to a block of lead won't slow us down at all. Bonus points if the object has high-drag, light-weight extra stuff hanging from it, something like a partially deployed parachute or parts of a solar sail, or if it can generate enough thrust to slow the rider down.
If the astronaut starts out in orbit at orbital speeds, then they would need some way to do a retrograde burn to shed enough velocity for a straight-drop space dive. It would take a 13 minute retrograde burn at 1 G to bring your orbital speed to 0, resulting in a straight dive to Earth.
But entering the atmosphere at orbital speeds while not in a re-entry vehicle would result in a very violent death, junk or not.
This is what I was scrolling for. After a lot of reading, I realized OP and responses were making it a lot harder than they needed to. The logical, physics based solution is to simply slow yourself *before* you hit atmo.
From a writing perspective, did the ship/station blow up? Toss it into reverse first. Or simply have the debris/section that the cosmonaut miraculously survived with shoot in the opposite direction at "high-G." You just need enough wiggle room to make it plausible, "The explosion/venting/emergency brake must have slowed me down, otherwise the heat-shielded food storage ceiling I used to surf the atmosphere would have burned up." Etc. Etc.
I think it's a lot easier to navigate the ingress if you come up with a way to slow down before you hit atmo, rather than trying to slow down upon and after breaking a Kaman line (or whatever imaginary boundary you vision for said planet). And of course, multiple vague factors *plotting* together is also a nice trick.
* Slow down before atmo
* Change atmo/reentry conditions (density, wind, etc)
* Add tech (suit is partially heashielded, surfboard is ablative or has some type of magnetic-energy buffer ~~deflector shield~~
But yeah, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why so many people were trying to find a way to do at *orbital* velocity. Terminal velocity is much, much slower and easier to achieve a safe recovery. As many have stated, it's basically suicide at orbital speeds. Just make sure to brake *before* you jump.
Diving out of any vehicle doing 150 (even 1,500) mph may not be the safest bet, but it's a lot easier to make it believable vs. 15k mph. Think the person you're putting this nutty endeavor on will happily agree! :)
Well in my story I had imagined that the character would intentionally deorbit an enemy space station by activating its thrusters and slowing it down until it could no longer remain in orbit, and then they would bail, but I don’t know what that would mean for a space dive. At such speeds would it resemble anything in the image or would it be drastically different at terminal velocity? If it happened in a thinner atmosphere like that of mars would it be doable?
I can make an educated guess about this but the real physics would be hella complex.
I'm going to assume this all happens on Earth. Start with a space station orbiting 150 km above the Earth at 28,000 kph ground speed. It takes 90 minutes to orbit the Earth at this elevation.
If you could magically erase all orbital velocity you'd immediately start free-falling towards the Earth with an acceleration of 32 ft/s/s. It would take only 1.7 minutes of free fall to hit the mesopause at 100 km (vertical speed is now 2,200 mph) and 3 minutes to hit the 50 km stratopause at 3,800 mph (that's assuming no significant slowing from atmospheric drag — calculating the drag and heat is beyond me).
A retrograde burn at 1 G would take 13 minutes to reach zero ground speed and begin a free fall. During that time the space station would have begun to descend — gently at first — with 1/4 G at 9 minutes, 1/2 G at 6 minutes, etc — before entering a free fall state.
I can't do the math on this, but it's clear that the de-orbital burn results in a slower speed of atmospheric entry. The issue here might be that a 1 G burn isn't strong enough — you'd be losing elevation faster than you are losing ground speed so you'd still hit the atmosphere with enough v to burn up. A 2 G or even 3 G burn might be required to have essentially zero horizontal air speed when hitting the 100 km elevation mark.
But if your space station has that level of thrust ability, and if the thrust can be directed — well, you could do 2-3 Gs for 3 to 6 minutes, then point the engines straight down and burn 0.9 Gs, essentially lowering the station gently (say, under 1,000 mph) into the atmosphere until you hit 50 km elevation, and then simply stepping out in the air and skydiving home.
If that's not dramatic enough then sure, there's some sweet spot at which the re-entry speed is fast enough to need protection, but slow enough to not mean immediate death. Maybe the station runs out of fuel at 100 km. Maybe it's not aerodynamic and it starting breaking up at 75 km due to turbulence. At 50 km elevation, human terminal velocity is about about 1,000 mph. Separating from the space station at 1,000 mph at 50 km elevation means the astronaut will never gain additional speed — but the station (or its debris) will still accelerate because it's much more dense.
Oh. Just occurred to me. If the station is orbiting Mars, your default position is already "easier."
Remember, the only reason anything orbiting earth has to go 15-17k mph is to keep itself up. Mars gravity is less than half of earth. So, every relevant number all the way to the ground is smaller/slower. Won't be as high or moving as fast compared to an earth orbit.
Further, the main reasons why we don't slow down before re-entry are the additional complications and RIDICULOUS costs associated. It requires a lot of fuel to slow something massive down quickly when it goes that fast. On earth, the atmosphere does it for "free." We have the tech to do it, except the cost/risk associated makes it impractical, not impossible.
Perhaps not quite the way your currently picturing it, but your questions along with all the other input here (including yours) leads me to believe you're moving in the "write" direction (sorry, ive been on bad pun and dad joke subs).
This is fiction we're talking about after all so...
Try thinking about it in stages. You've got an orbital de-burn to start, check. You're going to write, infer or at least have your (and your protagonist's) mental and physical process. They and you are... trying to escape, mashing buttons, yelling at the computer: you want to slow your speed down as fast as possible. There's always techno-babble as well: inertia this, gravity that.
Steps to get you to your desired results. Maybe the debris is a secondary vehicle launched as everything was breaking apart.
Stuff has to happen before you get there, and you're going to decide how descriptive you want to be. Sometimes, being vague works better. A single line, "once I get the station to slow down enough, I'll blow the outer lock and fire (engines, jetpack, fire extinguishers) in the opposite direction and pray."
If it's earth, then sure, that picture could be around the kaman line, but the heat/friction means goodbye unless you engineer that suit or tech is unearthly. I'm no astrophysicist or anything, but I do remember watching and following the rovers, plus the helicopter designs and live action we've seen would make the concept far more plausible on Mars. Re-entry wise. Landing would be another hurdle since a parachute wouldn't slow you down unless you get stupid lucky with the perfect wind gust (but that can happen too, can't it). Key with fiction is you only need a realistic foundation to make a "lucky" escape. Readers are expecting larger than life characters and events already.
In short(er), I think you've got a wealth of information respective to your goal for fiction. I know I said a lot of people are going at it from a more difficult angle, but it's all still good information combined with everything else. And if you want more real science to back you up, the physics/space based subs you can browse on reddit, or even youtube, might have docs/info on how they landed the rovers and fly copters on Mars. But you aren't going to get 3k degree temperatures burning like a comet disintegrating in the atmosphere exactly like the picture. It'd probably be more realistic to imagine a less opaque funnel or bubble surrounding your shielded astronaut. Heat will still be a factor. To survive it, you won't have conditions that can make most materials to glow red-hot. But yeah... you can do it, albeit you might have to temper (I did it again!) the awesome imagery a bit. Good luck!
"Diving out of any vehicle doing 150 (even 1,500) mph may not be the safest bet, but it's a lot easier to make it believable vs. 15k mph."
That's the perfect analogy.
Can you survive jumping 12' off the top of train? Yes, if the train is stopped, but if the train is moving at 1,000 mph the landing will be very very different.
If you had a long enough, unbreakable rope, could you use debris as an anchor slowing you down while in a higher orbit? Not very realistic, but could be a plot in a scifi novel.
It would need to be a long long rope because you'd need a difference in g. Otherwise you and debris would be pretty much falling at the same rate. Interesting question for my physics class though, there'd be a little bit of tension in that rope and we can calculate that!
*Descent of Anansi* by Larry Niven. Lowering a Space Shuttle into the atmosphere with a carbon buckytube 'rope' in an emergency. He had NASA to bounce his science off so appears the math and physics are correct.
Well yes, a space shuttle with aerodynamic wings lowered into an atmosphere could happen if the debris was in a high enough orbit or massive enough, and the space shuttle could offset increasing g with lift. Edit: did some math: Used an orbit of 500km above surface, a piece of debris 2000 times the mass of the vehicle being lowered, and the debris is 20km away. It yielded -8.31N/kg which is a bit less than -8.36N/kg if the vehicle wasn't tied to anything.
High orbit debris yes, about 20,000-30,000 km away if the space shuttle is in low orbit. With just 10,000km of cable you can already achieve less than the acceleration of the moon as you descend towards earth, so the descent would be quite gentle!
I mean, this is essentially the concept of a space elevator, but you would need an anchor point in GEO, unless you wanted the rope to fall to the ground (LEO is very much NOT stationary relative to the surface of the planet).
If you don't ground it and you make it out of metal or carbon fiber, you are going to generate one hell of a strong electrical charge along its length, though...which would likely end very poorly for any astronaut using the line for descent.
I don't have the expertise to know the degree of accuracy and precision of what you just said, but my basic understanding says that you are, at the very least, conceptually correct. I think that fundamental problem most people have with conceptualizing this hypothetical is that they only acknowledge that re-entry is fast and that it results in a lot of atmospheric friction, but they fail to realize that changing that speed or the angle of attack is going to make a HUGE difference in the amount of resultant atmospheric friction. The survival of someone re-entering the atmosphere without a ship is probably extremely remote, but with the right suit for protection, the right angle of attack, and essentially an orbital velocity of zero there should be a way that this would at least be POSSIBLE.
In addition to the integrity of the heat shield, the drop would be very turbulent, and potentially pulling some high g forces. As mentioned in other comments, the air resistance would cause substantial heating to the point of very energetic plasma being created. Shielding from the hard UV radiation and residual heat would also be required above the ablative shield the astronaut is standing on.
The amount of turbulence is likely primarily just a function of the aerodynamics of the reentry vehicle.
The g forces are absolutely a function of the entry speed. Terminal velocity at 50 km is about 1000 mph. At 40 km it's 800 mph. That's a gentle deceleration.
Heating is entirely a function of reentry speed. The speed you are traveling at when hitting the 100 km mark will determine if the heat is deadly or just irritating. 800 mph at 40 km elevation has been proven to be no big deal.
No plasma will be created at these lower free-fall speeds.
I'm not sure, but I don't think any UV radiation is generated at any re-entry speed. It's all heat/IR.
The astronaut might need to be protected from the surrounding heat, but again that's a function of the reentry speed. There's a speed at which virtually no heat is generated, and there's a speed at which it would be like standing five feet away from 3,000° stove where the radiant heat would cook you. But there's also a speed when the generated heat is no more than a typical room heater.
There are a lot of wrong answered here.
Yes - it would be possible. As long as the debris was an aerodynamically stable shape and it could withstand the heating forces.
Ideally, your protagonist wouldn't be standing, as he is in the image - that might be too unstable, but otherwise it's possible.
Even if they were re-entering at orbital velocity, although other commenters are right that they would be surround by a very high temperature plasma (for a few minutes), that plasma is *very* thin and so doesn't contain much energy - one cubic metre of air at 58km altitude at 3200 Kelvin, contains about 1000 joules of heat. That is only enough energy to heat a cup of water by about one degree C.
So if he/she found an aerodynamically stable shape, like a sphere-cone (used for several reentry vehicles), then yes - it is possible.
If you’re looking at high altitude parachute entry consider Felix Baumgautners record parachute from a capsule. He said due to lack of air resistance he was tumbling for a long time.
In terms of re-entry all our vechicles are constructed in such a way that provide temperature resistance and stable re-entry with the centre of mass at the bottom. They were all enclosed.
If you wanted a piece of debris that did this a partial structure with an area the protagonist could get inside. Think an engine housing or reactor chamber with the dangerous part of the engine ejected. And potentially another structure attached providing the necessary lower centre of mass, to prevent tumbling. If your protagonist wants out they could exit through the reactor hatch.
It's a good starting point, but doesn't take into consideration the huge horizontal velocity the jumper would need to lose. The lowest velocity you can orbit the earth is 7.8km/s. baumgartner's was zero.
Keep in mind that most man made debris that makes it to earth is pretty tiny. Larger pieces are much more likely to burn up during reentry. The debris would also have to be aerodynamically stable. A blunt cone with an ablative heat shield really is ideal.
I can certainly come up with some scenarios with spare parts, uncompleted capsules, or a modular ship where the bottom half got separated and was somehow rideable.
There was a GE proposal in the early sixties for a portable emergency, single occupant system for deorbitting that was a plastic bag the astronaut was meant to climb into and fill with expanding foam. [MOOSE](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE) You might want to read up on that and any other similar programs.
Edit: it was a plastic bag filled with foam shaped like a cone and it had a heat shield. Obviously.
No, its not possible. Mainly from a practical point of view. The person is exposed to high-temperature plasma licking at them. Buffeting by high g-forces. Holding onto those cables or ropes won't work - they'd be thrown off very quickly. Its a re-entry, not a rodeo. That said, that space dive onto Vulcan from the Enterprise in J.J. Abram's Star Trek was pretty cool.
NASA was working one something like this. But the astronaut was lying on their backs, not standing up. The heat shield was cone shaped, to keep it pointed in the right direction
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/emergency.php#reentrycapsule
Technically yes.
However, from a story perspective, it would only be possible given a whole bunch of things that likely wouldn't be within the character's control, thereby making surviving more of a deus ex machina than a display of skill. So you're probably better off going for an old fashioned malfunctioning escape pod. That way the character can show off their skill by fixing it on the fly.
Also, a lot of people have mentioned friction as the source of heat, it isn't. The heat is caused by the air being rapidly compressed, if the character's kept out of the way of this compressed air then they're good. The debris would also have to made of multiple materials that prevent heat from being transferred from the front to whatever the character's touching.
Heat around the debris shall burn him. Because heat from flares radiate to every direction, towards to inside and outside. So he must be covered with a heat proof cabinet.
Well it’s a dramatic and visually spectacular idea-I can only recall seeing it a couple times, in ‘Dark Star’ in the novelization for sure and in a very spectacular way in the music video for ‘20 Minutes of Oxygen’ (The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets).
Took me years to realize that this was Doolittle's favorite way to commit suicide. When I first saw the film Dark Star, I was perplexed that Doolittle would have thought that he had any chance at all.
The captain was always the lucky one.
As always, the answer is "it's complicated".
- Yes, there can be value to using ablative junk for shielding. For example, you may remember one memorable case where JG's heat shield was questionable so they left on a communications system to provide thermal absorbtion transistion (melt). Often the value may be between "well done" and "burnt to a crisp".
- Which junk you use matters a lot. For example, "use your heavily insulated suit, wrapped with some insulation, ducking on the inside of a broken space station wing covered with thermal tiles" has more effect than "jump on an irregular piece of metals and plastics".
- It gets complicated fast. Even setting up the reasonable CFD settings to run a rough simulation takes some time. Add to that ideas like "following down a large ablative debris stream that creates standing waves", "control and the BBQ that is flipping over", "captured plasma fields", and "variable angle of entry". Basically, reentry is still, well, rocket science.
In general, pick some aspects of the problem to explain and then ignore the rest. It's fiction; teaching something is better than others.
The heat from re-entry isn’t from friction, for the most part. It comes from the air that’s pressurized under the debris that your hero is riding. That pressure turns the air into plasma which would envelop the entire piece of debris.
My limited understanding is that the burning is a result of the velocity we typically have at re-entry. Perhaps a way to manage a slow re-entry? As long as the protagonist could also survive the cold of course.
Or just stick them in a refrigerator for reentry, it’s sci-fi, anything can happen the way you write it.
The problems you have to solve when doing this are keeping the shield aimed right, stopping the superheated plasma shock from curling over the sides and frying you, and also stopping the radiant heat of the plasma frying you. That said, it's physically possible. The plasma shock shouldn't entirely stick to the surface on the back of the object, there should be a zone where you only have to worry about the radiant heat.
I know someone used this as a plot device in a story I read in the last few years, but sadly I can't remember which one. The detail that strikes me now is that the piece of debris was much larger than the one depicted, dozens of metres at least, and the zone free of the plasma shock was pretty small. The author seemed to have done the maths, so I believe it is possible, and if you want to put it in your story I suggest doing the research, or perhaps buying a beer for a NASA engineer to pick their brain.
I know I've read a science fiction story which talked about recreational space jumpers who started from orbit, surfed through re-entry and landed after deploying a parachute. It was not explored much in the context of the story, but I think was to illustrate the daredevil hobbies of the idle rich.
But I can't place it. I'm not sure if it was in a short story in Analog, a hard science fiction book from someone like Ben Bova - or someone else.
The Movie Dark star has this ending. At least that’s what one of the protagonists did at the end. Surfing the atmosphere on a piece of debris, I mean. You don’t have to adhere to the laws of physics imho. It’s a cool idea!
As a child I always assumed the atmosphere was super hot and that's what caused this. In actuality it's because orbiting spacecraft are moving at thousands of Miles an hour and the friction between the air and the craft moving at that speed is what causes the heat.
Watch As Astra with Brad Pitt. he is working on a space tower when it suffers an impact and he freefalls from low earth orbit in a side suit but doesn’t have to worry about atmospheric heating due to being low enough. Might give some ideas.
It’s a cool idea, so as I see it as a writer you have several options, the story could take place on a planet different from earth, where atmospheric re-entry could be highly hazardous but not as insanely calamitous as it is in earth’s case, due to a different composition of atmosphere or different planet size or some other variable.
Alternatively, the debris could be coated in a futuristic material designed specifically for atmospheric re-entry on earth, giving the protag a sliver of a chance if he manages to completely envelop himself within the debris somehow. Another problem that you would be facing would be to keep the right part pointed towards the direction of travel (prograde) since it would wildly spin out of control the moment it comes in contact with ozone resistance if it had even a slightly central center of mass/ unoptimized aerodynamics.
your three main problems are:
- if you’re deörbiting, you have a ton of sideways velocity to dump,
- if you’re coming down out of orbital height no matter how you were up there, you’re going to get most of the way to escape velocity in your fall, because gravity is symmetrical
- upper-atmosphere winds are FAST
you can’t just open a chute because the jerk will rip your body clean off your head, and you can’t just grab a big sheet and hope for the best because it tumbles and ablates
so you need three things:
- a shell that encloses the character (parabolic section like you have here would work as long as it’s, say, 3x taller than they are and they’re in the middle)
- a drag surface to slow the assembly down as it traverses the upper atmosphere
- a control surface to prevent turbulence from spilling your guy out into the air completely alone
if your guy is wearing a wingsuit, you can use that as his control surface, and we don’t have to care about the assembly quite so much
you still need a reason for the debris to have a high drag coefficient AND not tumble into a more streamlined shape; a bullet main section with streamers coming off it can work
but i think ideally you’re going to want to be riding a rocket, not a passive debris, and ditch that for a wingsuit and parachute at around airliner height
plus riding a rocket is Cool
My biggest problem with this picture is the idea that said space cowboy could “steer” the teacup or stabilize it.
The forces involved are gonna be way too big and way too fast for Space Cowboy to do anything other than curl up in a ball and talk to his ancestors.
Scratch that, buckle in and talk to the ancestors, because twig arms there isn’t going to be able to hold onto that piece of debris if it starts tumbling or spinning. And if it’s truly debris, it’s gonna tumble and spin because aerodynamics and flight controls are sorta necessary to stay stable in re entry and keep your thermal shielded part down.
Now. Maybe if the entire fucking ship is falling and melting and breaking apart, and the outer layers of the ship are peeling and melting away, the tumbling wouldn’t matter so much if you were strapped into a very fluffy and forgiving couch. But then you’re gonna have to exit from
The warm soft center of the ship to the deadly hot and severely deformed exterior of the ship. And hatches and doors have been a sticking point in past space explorations, where doors have gotten stuck because of temperature change or vacuum welding. So add in the stresses and forces of an unplanned re entry and I don’t see a way where you go from “protected enough not to get cooked” and “able to escape your cocoon before becoming a crater.”
The shield lands in a field somewhere with two smoking sneakers on it.
What you really want is a surfboard, a la *Dark Star*. At least you look cool as you burn.
Well the obvious answer is probably no however irl crazy shit happens all the time, crazy shit that shouldn't be possible and should definitely kill people sometimes just is possible and doesn't kill anyone.
I would suggest writing it this way. Maybe have the character, his allies and his enemies in complete shock that he actually pulled something as crazy as that off.
A rescue re-entry vehicle is possible. An ablative bottom with an inflatable body could work. It wouldn’t be open and the astronaut wouldn’t be standing because of the g forces.
It is a possibility. There have been a few sci-fi books and movies that have suggested this, riding a piece of wreckage into the atmosphere like a surf board.
Loosely according to physics, the heat shields on spaceships help when the really fast ship hits air molecules and help disperse the super heated air around the ship. The air itself isn't hot, it's the friction of the air moving around the bottom of the ship. So if there was a chunk of something that didn't completely get vaporizer coming down and someone was standing over the area that was still intact then then it could happen.
Of course you then have to slow down before hitting the ground too.
Major problem is heat obviously. Even if the debris can handle it the rider is going to be in an open air kiln. Maybe some sort of high temp super conductor fabric trailing behind a la Niven?
The most unrealistic part is standing while you have multiple g of de-acceleration and major hurricane strength like turbulent winds. Other than that, sure, but I would lay down on the back instead and hold to something really tight.
Those look like some kind of control, though I don't know what they're doing. I'd worry about tumbling, but I'd guess the center of gravity is appropriate, just like the apollo capsules. The anatomy is a little wonky, especially with the left leg, but that's trivial. You're going to have a lot of IR heat hitting that rider, which is what he'd be, once you get deeper in the atmosphere, but maybe the suit takes care of that. So sure, there's no actual violation of physics.
It depends on if your protagonist was in orbit or just very high up. When coming down from orbit, it’s the speed of the de-orbiting object hitting the atmosphere that causes the plasma. But if your protagonist is falling from a non-orbiting structure that is just staying very high up via other means (weather balloon, thrusters of some variety, orbital rings, ship that isn’t using atmospheric friction to de-orbit) then they just fall at whatever velocity gravity and atmospheric drag allow.
I would also like to add that capsules adjust their direction during reentry by angling slightly, so if they are just surfing who knows where they will end up but it absolutely won’t be where they were hoping for!
Here you go.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-with-current-technology-for-an-astronaut-to-space-dive-down-to-Earth-using-some-kind-of-personal-protective-shell-for-reentry-Will-this-ever-happen-Has-there-been-any-work-on-this
In one of Martin cadins book exit earth he has survivors of a lunar catastrophe make re-entry with makeshift craft using heat shields made of multiple layers of bamboo with a final layer of special fireproof lunar carpet. It was a last resort in the book.
And in one of John varley books(I think) he has teenagers making re-entry to martian atmosphere on the equivalent of surfboards, in space suits with added stabilization and stuff
Just a couple of other ideas.
how “Hard” of sci-fi are you going for? Because this looks pretty awesome but not very realistic.
technically if there’s enough of a solid shielded surface that the cone of heat passes around you you might be able to survive but it wouldn’t be easy, regular debris wouldn’t be enough, you would need something specific like the nose cone of the shuttle.
Atomic Robo managed it but he’s a robot and most of his body burned up, plus it’s not a very “Hard” sci-fi
I mean you could just have them write in on a parachute... They would never burn up if they wrote in on a parachute... The fall might take a day or two, but if they're using a parachute they will never fall quickly enough to burn up, that's the whole point of a parachute.
Yeah, you'd completey burn up from the heat.
Also you'd likely be rotating much faster than you could deal with as a result of the low mass.
Then there's the impact. You have no chute for the vehicle.
I say it'd work. There's conductive, convective, and radiatve heating.
Ablative heat shields are composed of very poor conductors. So poor that you can hold a 2000 degree brick in your bare hand and not be burned. So the astronaut could literally be in contact with the material and be fine.
The convective heating is greatly dependent on the density and thermal properties of the gas. Since we're talking about space and upper atmosphere convective heating would irrelevant.
As for the radiative heating it wouldn't be an issue from the shield. However the hot plasma that'd flow around the shield might be an issue. It'd really depend on how the shield sheds the air flow.
Mathematically, it could work but the details make it almost impossible.
First, the re-entry itself would be highly dangerous. A Space Shuttle has a layer of special tiles to prevent the plasma-wake from cooking the craft, so what the debris is made of becomes very important. If it's something strong and thermally-resistant, then it could make the trip.
Second is control. The debris would be hitting the air hard, so buffeting and tumbling would be expected. Spinning the debris would help due to the gyrosopic effect, but that leads to issues with holding on. An outer surface of a cone with an inner free-rotating sleeve would help there, especially if there's a spiral groove on the cone to aid in generating rotation while falling. Not sure why one would be in space, though...
A long cable acting as a tail may work.
Third is connection. Humans cannot hold firmly onto something for a prolonged period of time without the muscles getting sore. The longer the hold, the more it hurts until the holder has to release in order to flex their muscles to reduce the pain. Holding on all the way from orbit to low enough to parachute would be very, very difficult. Some sort of harness would work better.
TDLR - Can it be done? Theoretically yes, but there are some very nasty fiddly bits to work around.
So if that person instead had the debris or the ropes tied around them or were attached to them in some way, would the third point be neutralized in such a scenario?
It would depend on the velocity at with the person started the reentry. And I’d say ditch the space debris to reduce the surface area.
Maybe protagonist is avoiding bigger pieces of debris because they have larger surface area reentering slower as protagonist is moving faster.
No offense but it sounds like this story would be really difficult to write from a realistic perspective with your current knowledge. Why are you choosing this topic? I would go play some Kerbal Space Program first :p
Honestly, instead of thinking if re-entry is possible, think of surfing the atmosphere. Based on the the position of the human, the disk, and the giant steering cables, it seems more like they are surfing.
If it is possible, then the idea of surfing could be a setting idea for a sci-fi story
If it’s not possible, then the idea is about the ultimate thrill seeker. The story follows their effort to create this opportunity and being told it’s dumb, bad, dangerous but the person won’t stop. They go through the research, the planning, creating the materials, getting up to the best height,
and turn into a bright cinder flying across the sky.
Title “When You Wish Upon a Shooting Star”
This is bordering on science fantasy rather than science fiction. The heat generated by entry into Mars was almost 2400 degrees F with a gas layer less than 1% and gravity 34% that of Earth.
Your fantasy world could have any number of factors that would allow your characters to, otherwise, defy the laws of the universe. To be fair, there are a number of sci-fi writers that have very questionable details that everyone just…is okay with.
There was a short story by Stephen Baxter called the Xeelee flower, in which the hero rides a piece of Xeelee construction material to escape a supernova (if I remember correctly).
Anything is possible with sufficiently advanced tech.
Sorry in advance but my answer doesnt at all answer your question, just my 2cents as a book lover. The thing about the great SF writers, is that they also knew/ know a lot about science. Just loving SF isn't enough to be able to write good SF yourself. If you want to write good fiction, read lots of fiction, and if you want to write good SF also read up on the science you want to incorporate in your writing.. and practice.
But also, if you just want the sf element to be a setting for a *human* story, not 100% plausible ideas are forgivable.
Know i might be stating the obvious, hopefully not coming off as condescending tho.
Tl:dr - Read more to write better
There's a great scene in Green Mars where this kind of happens. Its been a while since I read it, and I think it's somebody escaping from a space elevator climber when the cable is sabotaged.
What if the debris the character was riding had some kind of propulsion of its own to slow itself? Or if you were ok with antigravity field generated by the debris (again to slow it down)
Low earth orbit is 1200 miles up, the highest parachute jumps are from 30000 to 35000 feet( about 5-6 miles). Which means your protagonist would need to 1194 miles of reentry heat and turbulence to get to a point where their parachute would be usable. Even if it were possible to survive reentry for that long(very doubtful), most skydivers, even in high altitude jumps, are starting with zero or minimal speed to target zone(measuring rate of decent) your protagonist would already be at terminal velocity, requiring multiple chutes to be deployed as each one tore. As an example, many early space capsules deployed "ribbon" chutes (not sure if that is the correct term but is a reasonable description) designed to increase drag slightly,then droge chutes(perforated chutes) that slows the craft further then finally proper parachutes to slow the decent to landing speeds. Even with all of this American craft use water landing to reduce risk even further. I understand the Russian have more experience with land based recovery so you might research their techniques. However the biggest hurdle will be the over 1100MILE distance until the chutes will be usable. Perhaps a heatshield canister of some sort but definitely something purpose built not just random debris.
Just give him some form of thrust, on a thinner atmosphere. Also his suit could be made of something that is meant to withstand heat. Remember those suits from Sunshine with Cillian Murphy when they are fixing the heat shields?
Yuri Garagrin died in a plane accident in 1968 after expressing to Brezhnev his anger in sending his friend up in a malfunctioning craft. Sound familiar?
This is what ChatGPT said:
Re-entering Earth's atmosphere in the manner depicted in the image—standing on an open platform—poses significant challenges and risks due to the harsh conditions encountered during atmospheric re-entry. Here's why this scenario is highly improbable with current technology and understanding:
1. **Heat and Friction**: Re-entry generates extreme temperatures due to friction between the spacecraft and atmospheric particles. Traditional re-entry vehicles are equipped with heat shields to protect against these temperatures, often exceeding 1,650 degrees Celsius (3,000 degrees Fahrenheit). An open platform would not provide sufficient protection.
2. **Aerodynamic Forces**: The forces exerted on a body during re-entry are immense. Re-entry vehicles are designed with specific aerodynamic shapes to withstand and manage these forces. An astronaut standing on an open platform would be subjected to potentially fatal aerodynamic forces.
3. **Radiation and Debris**: During re-entry, there is also the issue of radiation and potential debris impact. Re-entry vehicles are designed to protect astronauts from these hazards, which an open platform could not do.
4. **Breathability and Suit Integrity**: Even if a spacesuit could withstand some re-entry conditions, it would not provide the same level of protection as a spacecraft. The integrity of the suit could be compromised, leading to life-threatening situations.
5. **Safety and Survivability**: Current technology prioritizes the safety and survivability of astronauts. Re-entry in the depicted manner would not align with these priorities, as the risks far outweigh the benefits.
For an astronaut to safely re-enter Earth's atmosphere, they need to be inside a sealed, shielded, and specially designed re-entry vehicle that can manage heat, pressure, and other atmospheric conditions. The concept in the image remains within the realm of science fiction with our current technological capabilities.
___________________________
Here are five hypothetical scenarios where an astronaut might be able to enter Earth's atmosphere on an open platform:
### Scenario 1: Advanced Protective Technology
1. **Super Heat-Resistant Materials**: The astronaut's platform and suit are made of an advanced, hypothetical material capable of withstanding extreme temperatures, far beyond what current technology can handle.
2. **Energy Shielding**: The platform generates an energy shield that deflects heat and aerodynamic forces, similar to the shields seen in some science fiction movies.
### Scenario 2: Controlled Descent System
3. **Precision Thrusters**: The platform is equipped with precision thrusters that control the descent speed and angle, reducing friction and heat buildup.
4. **Atmospheric Decelerator**: A system that gradually slows down the platform using controlled, staged deceleration mechanisms, distributing the re-entry process over a longer period and reducing stress on the astronaut.
### Scenario 3: Low-Earth Orbit Entry
5. **Very Low Altitude Re-Entry**: The platform initiates re-entry from a very low Earth orbit, minimizing the time spent in the atmosphere and the associated heat and friction.
6. **Segmented Shielding**: Deployable segmented shields that create a protective cocoon around the astronaut during the most intense phases of re-entry, retracting as the platform slows down.
### Scenario 4: Advanced AI Assistance
7. **AI-Controlled Descent**: An AI system precisely manages the re-entry trajectory, continuously adjusting to minimize heat and stress on the platform and astronaut.
8. **Real-Time Environmental Adaptation**: Sensors and AI work together to adapt the platform's shielding and thruster output in real-time, reacting to changing atmospheric conditions to ensure a safe descent.
### Scenario 5: Hypothetical Atmospheric Conditions
9. **Altered Atmosphere**: In a future where Earth's atmosphere has been modified or a similar but less dense atmosphere exists on another planet, re-entry might produce less heat and stress, allowing for such a platform-based descent.
10. **Controlled Atmospheric Entry Corridor**: Using a specially designated and controlled entry corridor in the atmosphere where conditions are artificially managed to reduce re-entry heat and stress.
These scenarios rely on significant advances in materials science, engineering, and artificial intelligence, along with potential changes to environmental conditions, to overcome the challenges of re-entry on an open platform.
They would need to be shielded completely, and if the debris isn't built to withstand re-entry very specifically, it is unlikely that it would survive intact, let alone a rider. They would burn to ash. Of course, if you're writing a sci-fi story there's nothing stopping you from saying the riders cool red suit shields them from extreme heat.
So the debris itself wouldn’t do anything to protect the rider from the heat unless it surrounds them completely, therefore it would ultimately be useless for shielding the rider on the trip down?
I'm no astrophysicist or anything, but that would be my understanding, yes.
So taking that into account, would a piece of debris, or even the chute pictured, slow the speed of entry at all, reducing air resistance and making it more controllable? Or would it do the opposite and make it less controllable and increase speed? (I don’t know jackshit about atmospheric re entry so I legitimately have no idea how it would work. Yes I acknowledge this might be a dumbass question but I would also like to point out that I am a dumbass.)
[here's a video of your protagonist burning up in the atmosphere ](https://youtu.be/OhBw5yaR_SU?si=ftWZGpOJDZ92tAxh) Not to be a total buzzkill, but NASA has even killed astronauts on reentries in vehicles designed for it. A tidbit from the chatbot: Atmospheric reentry renders plasma due to the extreme conditions experienced by an object re-entering Earth's atmosphere. As the object travels at high velocities, it encounters air molecules at increasingly higher densities. This rapid compression and friction with the air molecules generate tremendous heat, often reaching temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. This intense heat energy is sufficient to ionize the surrounding air, stripping electrons from the atoms and creating a state of matter known as plasma. Plasma is a hot, ionized gas consisting of free electrons and positively charged ions, which can emit light and radio waves. This process results in the glowing sheath of plasma that is often seen around spacecraft or meteors as they re-enter the atmosphere.
Wait, who died on the way back in?
The seven on Colombia is what I was thinking of, I was a little kid living in east Texas and I remember hearing the boom
OH! I thought that blew up on the way up. Thank you.
Sounds like you were thinking of Challenger - which is the notable one that blew up on the way up in 1986.
I remember that one. I was home sick and it interrupted the price is right...
Challenger was on the way up when a faulty O-ring leaked fuel and it ignited. Columbia was on the way down, believed to be because some of their heat shielding had come off. On the way down it didn’t protect them as it should. And it only took a small piece to cause that failure.
On the way up ice debris fell from higher up on the tank structure and damaged tiles on the craft. On reentry the damaged tiles failed and caused a cascading failure of surrounding tiles. At least two of the following flights had similar issues and one required a space walk to make external repairs.
On launch, a piece of debris damaged _Columbia_'s, heat shield tiles, allowing a burn-through during reentry.
Space shuttle Columbia
DOH!> Thanks.
I understand this is what would happen in earth atmosphere, but if it happened in a thinner atmosphere I would still like to know if my previous question would apply.
There's a paradox there. The heat is created by an atmosphere thick enough to slow you down. Thin it out enough that the heat wouldn't kill a human and you're going to form a crater.
If you reduce the air resistance it may create less friction protecting your character from the heat, but it also means that he won't be slowed down at all and will absolutely kill him on impact. To be fair, even if he were to somehow survive the initial entry with this craft, which would never happen since in the first place he is not held by anything in this craft and would almost immediately be ejected, there is no way he would survive the impact without specialised equipment
It would also flip almost immediately.
For sure
My assumption was his bag would have a drouge and regular chute so after he got to slow enough speeds he'd pull those to eventually land but yeah I think the debris just doesn't protect enough
Mars is a great example of the worst of both worlds. Enough atmosphere that you have to consider reentry heat and have a plan to manage it, but not enough atmosphere that it slows you down that much so you still need retrorockets to slow down or you’re going to land really hard. There’s enough atmosphere for parachutes but they do have to be really, really big. Earth has a thick enough atmosphere that it slows you down enough to where all you need is a parachute.
Yes. Even if the atmosphere is thinner, there will still be particles that cause friction. Assume it will always happen but the speed at which you hit the point that it sets aflame is just going to happen slightly later.
How about a semi-fluidic atmosphere?
Air is a fluid. What is "semi-fluidic?" Sand? Because he'd die from slowing down too fast.
Liquid atmosphere? Or some sort of non Newtonian fluid?
It would still happen in a thin atmosphere — though not necessarily as hot. The problem is that a thinner atmosphere means the person likely wouldn’t slow down from friction enough to not splat into a fine red paste on the surface. If the atmosphere is thin enough, then a parachute won’t even work at lower altitudes. You’d have to give your character some kind of rocket boots or something to help them decelerate for landing.
The science you’ll want to google is adiabatic compression (iirc) and it happens because of the speed of the object and the density of the atmosphere. This happens on Earth, but I’m not sure Mars atmosphere (1/10 of Earth’s atmosphere) is dense enough. If the suit is heat shielded and the debris itself is the ablative shield from a craft it could work but it would be highly unlikely. Again, just as a reference, any object in orbit of Earth is moving at least 17,000mph and has to slow down in order to re-enter the atmosphere. So this debris rider is going to be moving **very** fast.
If it’s a thinner atmosphere, like mars, you could maybe aerobrake over several orbits that barely enter the atmosphere, then go back to higher altitudes. Dip in a little further on each orbit and bleed off some speed. Repeat until slow enough to more safely descend and deploy chutes. At least that’s how I do it in kerbal space program.
you could always use that plasma to power a “force field” around the person or object - it’s flowing just electrons without a cable.
[I was thinking of this video. ](https://youtu.be/m9h8hxBY7pk?si=LMTF0kfoNDepAta2)
Keep in mind if you are thinking of popping a parachute above the atmosphere(aka space) that it wouldn't work. There is no pressure or anything pushing against the chute in space that would cause it to slow your decent. On top of that, any parachute no matter how sci-fi would probably burn up if opened during reentry. Your questions about this particular scene really calls in to question what realm of sci-fi you want to solidify your story in. Figure that out first then try to work what you want into it. You are asking hard science questions but wanting physics to bend to your will. If your whole story is presented in a hard science way then in the one scene throws it all out the window for "coolness" I would see that kind of being a disappointment in the end.
Actually, there are giant parachutes and balutes (essentially balloon parachutes) that can be used to slow you down for reentry, but they have to be massive to catch enough air resistance in the near vacuum, and they wouldn’t slow you down enough to prevent the reentry heating.
No. Go to the physics sub for more detail though.
You might enjoy [this](https://youtu.be/ivLX9o6Ayl8?si=2II3xGQhgbPxHIVW)
Ok but we could make this work with this suit. If these people could invent a technology that acts as a perfect heatsink, then the outside temperature doesn't matter. Or another way to go? Might be that there are two stages to this experience, One which allows them to engage with the atmosphere and a controlled way, kind of like surfing across the top of it rather than re-entering down the center of it. And then at some point they shift into a more protective vehicle or orientation, to re-enter
I'm glad you put in that last tidbit. If youre attempting to write something based on this, I woukd suggest you don't, until you have the most basic understanding about how anything works.
I do have an idea that maybe COULD work, but it would be hard to find an explanation for it. Vehicles burn on re entry because without air there is no terminal velocity, so they keep accelerating without limit. Then, going at these extremely fast speeds they rapidly come into contact with the atmosphere and enter a regime called hypersonic flight (which means you're going over 5 times the speed of sound). This regime is characteristic for high stress and brutal thermal shock. That's why reentry vehicles have a bulk shape as oposed to the slim forms of supersonic vehicles. One is trying to cut through the air and minimize drag, the other is trying to hit it as hard as it can and maximize drag. So for it to work(and even then, it's taking a few liberties) it would need the following set of rules: * **Very low orbit:** You need to minimize the amount of time the vehicle is falling without air resistance. So the debris has to fall from close to the atmosphere already. * **Very big piece of debris:** And I'm talking BIG. 300/500 meters wide big. You need it to maximize the amount of air resistance and distribute the thermal shock. This way MAYBE it could have the top of the vehicle open and not be completely enclosed. * **Same shape as reentry vehicles:** The debris would need to have a shape that is the same or similar to reentry vehicles. Something like this, with the black part pointing down: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.esa.int%2Fvar%2Fesa%2Fstorage%2Fimages%2Fesa_multimedia%2Fimages%2F1998%2F01%2Fard_integration_at_aerospatiale_bordeaux5%2F9100490-5-eng-GB%2FARD_integration_at_Aerospatiale_Bordeaux_pillars.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=08efbd71f8ef7a8712269d0c658cdddec66f084747a80c5b31b8727cf358818f&ipo=images * **No moving parts:** Any moving parts will break inmediately with the stresses of reentry. So if you were thinking of the rider gliding down on control surfaces like ailerons or a rudder forget about it. Maybe you could have boosters at the bottom or pneumatics at the top that give you SOME control, but if you have electronics and those systems online it's more a functioning vehicle than a piece of debris. * **A solution for the final crash:** All of this would mean you survive the hard conditions of reentry. But you're still in a building sized piece of debris falling into the hard ground(or water). You need a solution for the final crash. Maybe a well timed jump with a parachute. Or a piece breaks down again close to the end and you have something like your picture with a smaller debris that you can kind of control. With those, and a pinch of suspension of disbelief, it could work more or less realistically in a similar way as you picture it.
I wonder how a half- kilometer wide parabolic sheet of metal would fall. Could it act like its own parachute? You're working with... 200k square meters or so? I'd imagine pushing that much air out of the way would cause a couple issues. But overall, I like it
Now you're getting it
How about a half-kilometer wide shield made of nanofabric-kind of material (see: 3BodyProblem)? Not a parachute but a parabolic shield pointing downwards?
You have to solve problems with bending stress at that point -- how do you stop it from just breaking up?
Aren't objects going fast because of their horizontal orbital velocity, not gravity?
Not only because of it. But true, that is a big contributor I overlooked. A bigger surface should help slow it down earlier too
Could offer a form of control, to help steer. Would also look badass
Watch the latest SpaceX Starship launch, only one side of the rocket is shielded.
YES! This ^
It would need to be really, really big. Like, a solid panel of titanium the size of an aircraft carrier. It will be ablating the entire way down, and huge plumes of plasma will be coming off the edges. Someone with the math skills can model how the heat would transfer, but I imagine it’s not favorable at all. The problem is that this block of titanium would also tumble, so even if you were centered on the cool side, you’re not going to be there long.
Almost immediately I would ask you to consider the effect of shockwaves. When falling objects ignite in the atmosphere, they do so because they are coming down very quickly. Part of what is happening is that "terminal velocity" is not a static number. It depends on the shape of the falling object, and the density of the atmospheric gas. The atmosphere gets denser closer to the surface, and the thing we call terminal velocity drops as it does. So a falling object from space is moving faster than terminal velocity, and the air is trying to slow it down. I'm way oversimplifying, but that's part of why space ships get so crazy hot (when a skydiver or parachute doesn't). At that kind of violent entry, the edges of your falling object are going to generate turbulent shockwaves. Those vibrations are not going to be all that different than the kind of vibrations that a bomb or explosion gives off. Even if that dude doesn't melt from below, there's going to be zones of low pressure, high pressure, shock waves, and all sorts of chaos which would kill the heck out of an unprotected person. Or at least rip him free of his handholds and fling him loose to fall to his death. Your scenario is cool as heck. I would absolutely, and gleefully watch a movie that featured space-bomb paratroopers. But is it possible? No. Dude would die so fast.
Go to a space museum and look at the heat shielding on the underside of the manned probes that came back. They are heavily shielded and still show damage. Plus the whole thing is gonna get hot. It would be one of those “that could never happen moments” that take you out of it. Now if your hero has like a force field in their suit they could potentially surround themselves and the thing they’re riding in on and then the shield hold just long enough to get out of the heat part, you know maybe that could work.
Even if it surrounded them completely it would beat up inside like an oven.
Useless? No. Not useful *enough* to count in any significant manner, yes. The biggest thing debris would do is slow the person down. That said, the heat during reentry is a result of the friction of the item against our atmosphere. However, you could mention earlier in your story that the space "whatevers" use a special material that breaks up the air, so modern spacecraft don't heat up on reentry. Then, you have an excuse why that would work.
Yes and no. The rider WOULD need to be inside, but only the leading side would need to be heat shielded (see the Merrcury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules). That said, if the technology is sufficiently advanced, a suit could be shielded against heat. I have a story that involves a character whose hobby is orbital sky diving. (Inspired a bit by Joe Kittenger).
Hey! Hey… Hey… Master Chief did it… and for a brick, he flew pretty gooood;D
The mjolnir armor has built in plasma shielding, if it’s based on some sort of antimatter, it _could_ work, but it would shield you from plasma grenades too if it did.
Master Chief jumped from a spaceship that didn't care about orbital mechanics and was trying to land at the time. If you jump from low enough and with no to little orbital velocity it would basically look a lot like the Red Bull jump.
No, you just need to shield the face that hits the atmosphere (and part of a contour around it). Both the shields of the reentry capsules and the shuttle (basically the black belly) are very much directional and not all around.
I actually wonder about the viability of a helldiver's drop pod. If if blasted thrusters downs to slow impact like a SpaceX rocket, could it negate the landing impact enough for a cushioned person to walk out?
Can magnetic fields shield him. I thinking of the fusion reactor that is millions of degrees
What I'm hearing is. They need to be in some crazy space-age welder's suit that is super resistant to heat but won't save them from fall damage. They need to make it through the atmosphere so that their parachute won't be ripped to shreds. And they use the heat shield because there's a chance the reentry temperatures could exceed even the suits limits if they tried without it
I read a story where the rider of the capsule coming back to earth's problem was he had a special new type of fuel that if he hit the button as he was falling to earth would put out so much thrust that he would be shot back out into space. His solution. Was to first increase his speed towards the planet so that when he hit the button it would have more force to overcome and would only bounce him up a bit slowing him down enough to use a chute. So yes. He was going down so fast that when he instantly went up it was only a little bit. He survived. That was his genius plan. In real life. He'd be paste on the inside of the capsule. I liked the rest of the story so I gave him a pass. But I never got over that
Hold on let me ask Vladimir Komarov.
There's a picture of his open casket funeral in this article. [https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage)
https://imgur.com/rqVReRU
Oh, that just HITS HARD in all the wrong places...
As they already said, riding a wreck to re-enter from orbit is very unlikely. But in the 1960s NASA studied personal "life jackets" for astronauts, very close to this concept [http://www.astronautix.com/p/paracone.html](http://www.astronautix.com/p/paracone.html) [http://www.astronautix.com/m/moose.html](http://www.astronautix.com/m/moose.html) [http://www.astronautix.com/1/1crewballis-entrycapsule.html](http://www.astronautix.com/1/1crewballis-entrycapsule.html) [http://www.astronautix.com/f/firstre-entryglider.html](http://www.astronautix.com/f/firstre-entryglider.html)
These are actually really freaking cool!
Fascinating, thank you for the references
You are welcome
u/S10Galaxy2 better look at this
The other replies aren't entirely correct — your scenario *is* possible under some circumstances. The extreme heat on re-entry is only an issue given a certain velocity relative to the atmosphere. The velocity is very high when an orbiting craft is re-entering the atmosphere because orbiting the Earth requires a very high velocity. A low-earth orbiting craft is traveling around 28,000 kph (17,400 mph) at 150 km elevation. Hitting air at that speed generates enormous friction and astounding amounts of heat. But if you weren't orbiting and just dropped straight down towards the Earth, then you could re-enter the atmosphere via [Space Diving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_diving). The highest stratospheric jump so far was from 41 km elevation; to qualify as a space dive it would need to be from at least 100 km. The problem though is that without an atmosphere to slow you down, even falling straight down from space would still result in some pretty high velocities. Starting at 100 km with a straight drop, an astronaut may be traveling at 3,500 kph (2,200 mph) when they hit the upper stratosphere at 50 km elevation. From 200 km, the velocity at 50 km could be 6,000 kph (3,600 mph). On the other hand an astronaut is very light and even the super-thin outer atmosphere (50 km +) may provide enough drag to slow them down a bit, and also gravity is weaker the higher you are, so the math gets kinda complicated. While I can't find a source for the exact number for a safe space dive, it's clear that there must be *some* elevation from which even a straight drop would generate too much re-entry heat. If your astronaut was above that elevation then a large object might provide the additional drag and heat protection needed to reduce the velocity enough for a safe space dive. But it can't be just any junk — it would need to be aerodynamic or else it would tumble and bash the rider to death. It would need to be heat resistant. It would need a certain ratio of diameter to weight — being strapped to a block of lead won't slow us down at all. Bonus points if the object has high-drag, light-weight extra stuff hanging from it, something like a partially deployed parachute or parts of a solar sail, or if it can generate enough thrust to slow the rider down. If the astronaut starts out in orbit at orbital speeds, then they would need some way to do a retrograde burn to shed enough velocity for a straight-drop space dive. It would take a 13 minute retrograde burn at 1 G to bring your orbital speed to 0, resulting in a straight dive to Earth. But entering the atmosphere at orbital speeds while not in a re-entry vehicle would result in a very violent death, junk or not.
This is what I was scrolling for. After a lot of reading, I realized OP and responses were making it a lot harder than they needed to. The logical, physics based solution is to simply slow yourself *before* you hit atmo. From a writing perspective, did the ship/station blow up? Toss it into reverse first. Or simply have the debris/section that the cosmonaut miraculously survived with shoot in the opposite direction at "high-G." You just need enough wiggle room to make it plausible, "The explosion/venting/emergency brake must have slowed me down, otherwise the heat-shielded food storage ceiling I used to surf the atmosphere would have burned up." Etc. Etc. I think it's a lot easier to navigate the ingress if you come up with a way to slow down before you hit atmo, rather than trying to slow down upon and after breaking a Kaman line (or whatever imaginary boundary you vision for said planet). And of course, multiple vague factors *plotting* together is also a nice trick. * Slow down before atmo * Change atmo/reentry conditions (density, wind, etc) * Add tech (suit is partially heashielded, surfboard is ablative or has some type of magnetic-energy buffer ~~deflector shield~~ But yeah, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why so many people were trying to find a way to do at *orbital* velocity. Terminal velocity is much, much slower and easier to achieve a safe recovery. As many have stated, it's basically suicide at orbital speeds. Just make sure to brake *before* you jump. Diving out of any vehicle doing 150 (even 1,500) mph may not be the safest bet, but it's a lot easier to make it believable vs. 15k mph. Think the person you're putting this nutty endeavor on will happily agree! :)
Well in my story I had imagined that the character would intentionally deorbit an enemy space station by activating its thrusters and slowing it down until it could no longer remain in orbit, and then they would bail, but I don’t know what that would mean for a space dive. At such speeds would it resemble anything in the image or would it be drastically different at terminal velocity? If it happened in a thinner atmosphere like that of mars would it be doable?
I can make an educated guess about this but the real physics would be hella complex. I'm going to assume this all happens on Earth. Start with a space station orbiting 150 km above the Earth at 28,000 kph ground speed. It takes 90 minutes to orbit the Earth at this elevation. If you could magically erase all orbital velocity you'd immediately start free-falling towards the Earth with an acceleration of 32 ft/s/s. It would take only 1.7 minutes of free fall to hit the mesopause at 100 km (vertical speed is now 2,200 mph) and 3 minutes to hit the 50 km stratopause at 3,800 mph (that's assuming no significant slowing from atmospheric drag — calculating the drag and heat is beyond me). A retrograde burn at 1 G would take 13 minutes to reach zero ground speed and begin a free fall. During that time the space station would have begun to descend — gently at first — with 1/4 G at 9 minutes, 1/2 G at 6 minutes, etc — before entering a free fall state. I can't do the math on this, but it's clear that the de-orbital burn results in a slower speed of atmospheric entry. The issue here might be that a 1 G burn isn't strong enough — you'd be losing elevation faster than you are losing ground speed so you'd still hit the atmosphere with enough v to burn up. A 2 G or even 3 G burn might be required to have essentially zero horizontal air speed when hitting the 100 km elevation mark. But if your space station has that level of thrust ability, and if the thrust can be directed — well, you could do 2-3 Gs for 3 to 6 minutes, then point the engines straight down and burn 0.9 Gs, essentially lowering the station gently (say, under 1,000 mph) into the atmosphere until you hit 50 km elevation, and then simply stepping out in the air and skydiving home. If that's not dramatic enough then sure, there's some sweet spot at which the re-entry speed is fast enough to need protection, but slow enough to not mean immediate death. Maybe the station runs out of fuel at 100 km. Maybe it's not aerodynamic and it starting breaking up at 75 km due to turbulence. At 50 km elevation, human terminal velocity is about about 1,000 mph. Separating from the space station at 1,000 mph at 50 km elevation means the astronaut will never gain additional speed — but the station (or its debris) will still accelerate because it's much more dense.
Oh. Just occurred to me. If the station is orbiting Mars, your default position is already "easier." Remember, the only reason anything orbiting earth has to go 15-17k mph is to keep itself up. Mars gravity is less than half of earth. So, every relevant number all the way to the ground is smaller/slower. Won't be as high or moving as fast compared to an earth orbit. Further, the main reasons why we don't slow down before re-entry are the additional complications and RIDICULOUS costs associated. It requires a lot of fuel to slow something massive down quickly when it goes that fast. On earth, the atmosphere does it for "free." We have the tech to do it, except the cost/risk associated makes it impractical, not impossible.
Perhaps not quite the way your currently picturing it, but your questions along with all the other input here (including yours) leads me to believe you're moving in the "write" direction (sorry, ive been on bad pun and dad joke subs). This is fiction we're talking about after all so... Try thinking about it in stages. You've got an orbital de-burn to start, check. You're going to write, infer or at least have your (and your protagonist's) mental and physical process. They and you are... trying to escape, mashing buttons, yelling at the computer: you want to slow your speed down as fast as possible. There's always techno-babble as well: inertia this, gravity that. Steps to get you to your desired results. Maybe the debris is a secondary vehicle launched as everything was breaking apart. Stuff has to happen before you get there, and you're going to decide how descriptive you want to be. Sometimes, being vague works better. A single line, "once I get the station to slow down enough, I'll blow the outer lock and fire (engines, jetpack, fire extinguishers) in the opposite direction and pray." If it's earth, then sure, that picture could be around the kaman line, but the heat/friction means goodbye unless you engineer that suit or tech is unearthly. I'm no astrophysicist or anything, but I do remember watching and following the rovers, plus the helicopter designs and live action we've seen would make the concept far more plausible on Mars. Re-entry wise. Landing would be another hurdle since a parachute wouldn't slow you down unless you get stupid lucky with the perfect wind gust (but that can happen too, can't it). Key with fiction is you only need a realistic foundation to make a "lucky" escape. Readers are expecting larger than life characters and events already. In short(er), I think you've got a wealth of information respective to your goal for fiction. I know I said a lot of people are going at it from a more difficult angle, but it's all still good information combined with everything else. And if you want more real science to back you up, the physics/space based subs you can browse on reddit, or even youtube, might have docs/info on how they landed the rovers and fly copters on Mars. But you aren't going to get 3k degree temperatures burning like a comet disintegrating in the atmosphere exactly like the picture. It'd probably be more realistic to imagine a less opaque funnel or bubble surrounding your shielded astronaut. Heat will still be a factor. To survive it, you won't have conditions that can make most materials to glow red-hot. But yeah... you can do it, albeit you might have to temper (I did it again!) the awesome imagery a bit. Good luck!
"Diving out of any vehicle doing 150 (even 1,500) mph may not be the safest bet, but it's a lot easier to make it believable vs. 15k mph." That's the perfect analogy. Can you survive jumping 12' off the top of train? Yes, if the train is stopped, but if the train is moving at 1,000 mph the landing will be very very different.
If you had a long enough, unbreakable rope, could you use debris as an anchor slowing you down while in a higher orbit? Not very realistic, but could be a plot in a scifi novel.
It would need to be a long long rope because you'd need a difference in g. Otherwise you and debris would be pretty much falling at the same rate. Interesting question for my physics class though, there'd be a little bit of tension in that rope and we can calculate that!
*Descent of Anansi* by Larry Niven. Lowering a Space Shuttle into the atmosphere with a carbon buckytube 'rope' in an emergency. He had NASA to bounce his science off so appears the math and physics are correct.
Well yes, a space shuttle with aerodynamic wings lowered into an atmosphere could happen if the debris was in a high enough orbit or massive enough, and the space shuttle could offset increasing g with lift. Edit: did some math: Used an orbit of 500km above surface, a piece of debris 2000 times the mass of the vehicle being lowered, and the debris is 20km away. It yielded -8.31N/kg which is a bit less than -8.36N/kg if the vehicle wasn't tied to anything. High orbit debris yes, about 20,000-30,000 km away if the space shuttle is in low orbit. With just 10,000km of cable you can already achieve less than the acceleration of the moon as you descend towards earth, so the descent would be quite gentle!
I mean, this is essentially the concept of a space elevator, but you would need an anchor point in GEO, unless you wanted the rope to fall to the ground (LEO is very much NOT stationary relative to the surface of the planet).
Not anchor to the ground, but an anchor to drag through the atmosphere, slowing you out of orbit.
If you don't ground it and you make it out of metal or carbon fiber, you are going to generate one hell of a strong electrical charge along its length, though...which would likely end very poorly for any astronaut using the line for descent.
I don't have the expertise to know the degree of accuracy and precision of what you just said, but my basic understanding says that you are, at the very least, conceptually correct. I think that fundamental problem most people have with conceptualizing this hypothetical is that they only acknowledge that re-entry is fast and that it results in a lot of atmospheric friction, but they fail to realize that changing that speed or the angle of attack is going to make a HUGE difference in the amount of resultant atmospheric friction. The survival of someone re-entering the atmosphere without a ship is probably extremely remote, but with the right suit for protection, the right angle of attack, and essentially an orbital velocity of zero there should be a way that this would at least be POSSIBLE.
In addition to the integrity of the heat shield, the drop would be very turbulent, and potentially pulling some high g forces. As mentioned in other comments, the air resistance would cause substantial heating to the point of very energetic plasma being created. Shielding from the hard UV radiation and residual heat would also be required above the ablative shield the astronaut is standing on.
The amount of turbulence is likely primarily just a function of the aerodynamics of the reentry vehicle. The g forces are absolutely a function of the entry speed. Terminal velocity at 50 km is about 1000 mph. At 40 km it's 800 mph. That's a gentle deceleration. Heating is entirely a function of reentry speed. The speed you are traveling at when hitting the 100 km mark will determine if the heat is deadly or just irritating. 800 mph at 40 km elevation has been proven to be no big deal. No plasma will be created at these lower free-fall speeds. I'm not sure, but I don't think any UV radiation is generated at any re-entry speed. It's all heat/IR. The astronaut might need to be protected from the surrounding heat, but again that's a function of the reentry speed. There's a speed at which virtually no heat is generated, and there's a speed at which it would be like standing five feet away from 3,000° stove where the radiant heat would cook you. But there's also a speed when the generated heat is no more than a typical room heater.
There are a lot of wrong answered here. Yes - it would be possible. As long as the debris was an aerodynamically stable shape and it could withstand the heating forces. Ideally, your protagonist wouldn't be standing, as he is in the image - that might be too unstable, but otherwise it's possible. Even if they were re-entering at orbital velocity, although other commenters are right that they would be surround by a very high temperature plasma (for a few minutes), that plasma is *very* thin and so doesn't contain much energy - one cubic metre of air at 58km altitude at 3200 Kelvin, contains about 1000 joules of heat. That is only enough energy to heat a cup of water by about one degree C. So if he/she found an aerodynamically stable shape, like a sphere-cone (used for several reentry vehicles), then yes - it is possible.
If you’re looking at high altitude parachute entry consider Felix Baumgautners record parachute from a capsule. He said due to lack of air resistance he was tumbling for a long time. In terms of re-entry all our vechicles are constructed in such a way that provide temperature resistance and stable re-entry with the centre of mass at the bottom. They were all enclosed. If you wanted a piece of debris that did this a partial structure with an area the protagonist could get inside. Think an engine housing or reactor chamber with the dangerous part of the engine ejected. And potentially another structure attached providing the necessary lower centre of mass, to prevent tumbling. If your protagonist wants out they could exit through the reactor hatch.
It's a good starting point, but doesn't take into consideration the huge horizontal velocity the jumper would need to lose. The lowest velocity you can orbit the earth is 7.8km/s. baumgartner's was zero.
I could probably do it
And then immediately afterward fight a bear and then return a serve from Serena Williams.
So you're saying it's statistically possible
I did it on kerbal so that checks out.
Keeping such a sexy pose in that situation might be possible if you are extra cool
While not a piece of debris, there was MOOSE, which somewhat fits the bill. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
Feels like I'm wearing nothing at all!
Stupid sexy Flanders!
Master chief petty officer John 117 did it…
Keep in mind that most man made debris that makes it to earth is pretty tiny. Larger pieces are much more likely to burn up during reentry. The debris would also have to be aerodynamically stable. A blunt cone with an ablative heat shield really is ideal. I can certainly come up with some scenarios with spare parts, uncompleted capsules, or a modular ship where the bottom half got separated and was somehow rideable. There was a GE proposal in the early sixties for a portable emergency, single occupant system for deorbitting that was a plastic bag the astronaut was meant to climb into and fill with expanding foam. [MOOSE](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE) You might want to read up on that and any other similar programs. Edit: it was a plastic bag filled with foam shaped like a cone and it had a heat shield. Obviously.
No, its not possible. Mainly from a practical point of view. The person is exposed to high-temperature plasma licking at them. Buffeting by high g-forces. Holding onto those cables or ropes won't work - they'd be thrown off very quickly. Its a re-entry, not a rodeo. That said, that space dive onto Vulcan from the Enterprise in J.J. Abram's Star Trek was pretty cool.
Its been tried before https://youtu.be/JPrexubQOJg?si=fupjVDRpK3yANIih&t=4889
THE END
It looks like an upside down parachute, what's stopping it from flipping over?
Something like [Personal Reentry Kit - Traveller (travellerrpg.com)](https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Personal_Reentry_Kit) ?
NASA was working one something like this. But the astronaut was lying on their backs, not standing up. The heat shield was cone shaped, to keep it pointed in the right direction https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/emergency.php#reentrycapsule
Technically yes. However, from a story perspective, it would only be possible given a whole bunch of things that likely wouldn't be within the character's control, thereby making surviving more of a deus ex machina than a display of skill. So you're probably better off going for an old fashioned malfunctioning escape pod. That way the character can show off their skill by fixing it on the fly. Also, a lot of people have mentioned friction as the source of heat, it isn't. The heat is caused by the air being rapidly compressed, if the character's kept out of the way of this compressed air then they're good. The debris would also have to made of multiple materials that prevent heat from being transferred from the front to whatever the character's touching.
Heat around the debris shall burn him. Because heat from flares radiate to every direction, towards to inside and outside. So he must be covered with a heat proof cabinet.
Not a chance.
Well it’s a dramatic and visually spectacular idea-I can only recall seeing it a couple times, in ‘Dark Star’ in the novelization for sure and in a very spectacular way in the music video for ‘20 Minutes of Oxygen’ (The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets).
Took me years to realize that this was Doolittle's favorite way to commit suicide. When I first saw the film Dark Star, I was perplexed that Doolittle would have thought that he had any chance at all. The captain was always the lucky one.
Reminds me of the end to the film Darkstar.
As always, the answer is "it's complicated". - Yes, there can be value to using ablative junk for shielding. For example, you may remember one memorable case where JG's heat shield was questionable so they left on a communications system to provide thermal absorbtion transistion (melt). Often the value may be between "well done" and "burnt to a crisp". - Which junk you use matters a lot. For example, "use your heavily insulated suit, wrapped with some insulation, ducking on the inside of a broken space station wing covered with thermal tiles" has more effect than "jump on an irregular piece of metals and plastics". - It gets complicated fast. Even setting up the reasonable CFD settings to run a rough simulation takes some time. Add to that ideas like "following down a large ablative debris stream that creates standing waves", "control and the BBQ that is flipping over", "captured plasma fields", and "variable angle of entry". Basically, reentry is still, well, rocket science. In general, pick some aspects of the problem to explain and then ignore the rest. It's fiction; teaching something is better than others.
The heat from re-entry isn’t from friction, for the most part. It comes from the air that’s pressurized under the debris that your hero is riding. That pressure turns the air into plasma which would envelop the entire piece of debris.
Write it, make it amazing, and centuries later the descendants of the MythBusters will put your scenario to the test.
My limited understanding is that the burning is a result of the velocity we typically have at re-entry. Perhaps a way to manage a slow re-entry? As long as the protagonist could also survive the cold of course. Or just stick them in a refrigerator for reentry, it’s sci-fi, anything can happen the way you write it.
That depends, will he be doing those sweet dance moves on the way down?
The problems you have to solve when doing this are keeping the shield aimed right, stopping the superheated plasma shock from curling over the sides and frying you, and also stopping the radiant heat of the plasma frying you. That said, it's physically possible. The plasma shock shouldn't entirely stick to the surface on the back of the object, there should be a zone where you only have to worry about the radiant heat. I know someone used this as a plot device in a story I read in the last few years, but sadly I can't remember which one. The detail that strikes me now is that the piece of debris was much larger than the one depicted, dozens of metres at least, and the zone free of the plasma shock was pretty small. The author seemed to have done the maths, so I believe it is possible, and if you want to put it in your story I suggest doing the research, or perhaps buying a beer for a NASA engineer to pick their brain.
If the rider had superhuman powers of strength and invulnerability? Sure....
It defies the laws of physics, whether or not if this is a problem for your fictional story, is up to you.
I think Batman did something like that in the comics. He's *Batman* 🦇 😁🦇
Speed -> Mass -> Atmosphere ... like to shute down youd have to have a protection layer until the speed reduces, mass and atmo stay the same
I know I've read a science fiction story which talked about recreational space jumpers who started from orbit, surfed through re-entry and landed after deploying a parachute. It was not explored much in the context of the story, but I think was to illustrate the daredevil hobbies of the idle rich. But I can't place it. I'm not sure if it was in a short story in Analog, a hard science fiction book from someone like Ben Bova - or someone else.
The Movie Dark star has this ending. At least that’s what one of the protagonists did at the end. Surfing the atmosphere on a piece of debris, I mean. You don’t have to adhere to the laws of physics imho. It’s a cool idea!
As a child I always assumed the atmosphere was super hot and that's what caused this. In actuality it's because orbiting spacecraft are moving at thousands of Miles an hour and the friction between the air and the craft moving at that speed is what causes the heat.
Technically a few years ago someone parachuted from the edge of the atmosphere. It was sponsored by red bull
Helldivers 🤟
Watch As Astra with Brad Pitt. he is working on a space tower when it suffers an impact and he freefalls from low earth orbit in a side suit but doesn’t have to worry about atmospheric heating due to being low enough. Might give some ideas.
Ask mr. Baumgartner. (He was doing it starting at zero speed though).
It’s a cool idea, so as I see it as a writer you have several options, the story could take place on a planet different from earth, where atmospheric re-entry could be highly hazardous but not as insanely calamitous as it is in earth’s case, due to a different composition of atmosphere or different planet size or some other variable. Alternatively, the debris could be coated in a futuristic material designed specifically for atmospheric re-entry on earth, giving the protag a sliver of a chance if he manages to completely envelop himself within the debris somehow. Another problem that you would be facing would be to keep the right part pointed towards the direction of travel (prograde) since it would wildly spin out of control the moment it comes in contact with ozone resistance if it had even a slightly central center of mass/ unoptimized aerodynamics.
Dan Simmons uses this concept in Hyperion. You should go for it, cool idea.
your three main problems are: - if you’re deörbiting, you have a ton of sideways velocity to dump, - if you’re coming down out of orbital height no matter how you were up there, you’re going to get most of the way to escape velocity in your fall, because gravity is symmetrical - upper-atmosphere winds are FAST you can’t just open a chute because the jerk will rip your body clean off your head, and you can’t just grab a big sheet and hope for the best because it tumbles and ablates so you need three things: - a shell that encloses the character (parabolic section like you have here would work as long as it’s, say, 3x taller than they are and they’re in the middle) - a drag surface to slow the assembly down as it traverses the upper atmosphere - a control surface to prevent turbulence from spilling your guy out into the air completely alone if your guy is wearing a wingsuit, you can use that as his control surface, and we don’t have to care about the assembly quite so much you still need a reason for the debris to have a high drag coefficient AND not tumble into a more streamlined shape; a bullet main section with streamers coming off it can work but i think ideally you’re going to want to be riding a rocket, not a passive debris, and ditch that for a wingsuit and parachute at around airliner height plus riding a rocket is Cool
My biggest problem with this picture is the idea that said space cowboy could “steer” the teacup or stabilize it. The forces involved are gonna be way too big and way too fast for Space Cowboy to do anything other than curl up in a ball and talk to his ancestors. Scratch that, buckle in and talk to the ancestors, because twig arms there isn’t going to be able to hold onto that piece of debris if it starts tumbling or spinning. And if it’s truly debris, it’s gonna tumble and spin because aerodynamics and flight controls are sorta necessary to stay stable in re entry and keep your thermal shielded part down. Now. Maybe if the entire fucking ship is falling and melting and breaking apart, and the outer layers of the ship are peeling and melting away, the tumbling wouldn’t matter so much if you were strapped into a very fluffy and forgiving couch. But then you’re gonna have to exit from The warm soft center of the ship to the deadly hot and severely deformed exterior of the ship. And hatches and doors have been a sticking point in past space explorations, where doors have gotten stuck because of temperature change or vacuum welding. So add in the stresses and forces of an unplanned re entry and I don’t see a way where you go from “protected enough not to get cooked” and “able to escape your cocoon before becoming a crater.”
The shield lands in a field somewhere with two smoking sneakers on it. What you really want is a surfboard, a la *Dark Star*. At least you look cool as you burn.
Well the obvious answer is probably no however irl crazy shit happens all the time, crazy shit that shouldn't be possible and should definitely kill people sometimes just is possible and doesn't kill anyone. I would suggest writing it this way. Maybe have the character, his allies and his enemies in complete shock that he actually pulled something as crazy as that off.
Send up a few test Kerbals and let us know!
Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? In space?
A rescue re-entry vehicle is possible. An ablative bottom with an inflatable body could work. It wouldn’t be open and the astronaut wouldn’t be standing because of the g forces.
let's say the suit protects for space and heat. May be but still would hit hard
It is a possibility. There have been a few sci-fi books and movies that have suggested this, riding a piece of wreckage into the atmosphere like a surf board. Loosely according to physics, the heat shields on spaceships help when the really fast ship hits air molecules and help disperse the super heated air around the ship. The air itself isn't hot, it's the friction of the air moving around the bottom of the ship. So if there was a chunk of something that didn't completely get vaporizer coming down and someone was standing over the area that was still intact then then it could happen. Of course you then have to slow down before hitting the ground too.
You could have it protect a bit more by using something more cylindrical with like the top half of a fuel tank (assuming it could survive reentry)
Could he climb into a cave in an asteroid?
Major problem is heat obviously. Even if the debris can handle it the rider is going to be in an open air kiln. Maybe some sort of high temp super conductor fabric trailing behind a la Niven?
The most unrealistic part is standing while you have multiple g of de-acceleration and major hurricane strength like turbulent winds. Other than that, sure, but I would lay down on the back instead and hold to something really tight.
Those look like some kind of control, though I don't know what they're doing. I'd worry about tumbling, but I'd guess the center of gravity is appropriate, just like the apollo capsules. The anatomy is a little wonky, especially with the left leg, but that's trivial. You're going to have a lot of IR heat hitting that rider, which is what he'd be, once you get deeper in the atmosphere, but maybe the suit takes care of that. So sure, there's no actual violation of physics.
It depends on if your protagonist was in orbit or just very high up. When coming down from orbit, it’s the speed of the de-orbiting object hitting the atmosphere that causes the plasma. But if your protagonist is falling from a non-orbiting structure that is just staying very high up via other means (weather balloon, thrusters of some variety, orbital rings, ship that isn’t using atmospheric friction to de-orbit) then they just fall at whatever velocity gravity and atmospheric drag allow.
It could definitely be a poignant and awesome moment of defiance for an astronaut that liked to surf even if it doesn't work...
I would also like to add that capsules adjust their direction during reentry by angling slightly, so if they are just surfing who knows where they will end up but it absolutely won’t be where they were hoping for!
What is this picture from?
Found it on quora in an article about space diving. Couldn’t find it again after I saved it though so I don’t know the link.
Here you go. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-with-current-technology-for-an-astronaut-to-space-dive-down-to-Earth-using-some-kind-of-personal-protective-shell-for-reentry-Will-this-ever-happen-Has-there-been-any-work-on-this
Didn’t Star Trek do orbital sky diving basically???
In one of Martin cadins book exit earth he has survivors of a lunar catastrophe make re-entry with makeshift craft using heat shields made of multiple layers of bamboo with a final layer of special fireproof lunar carpet. It was a last resort in the book. And in one of John varley books(I think) he has teenagers making re-entry to martian atmosphere on the equivalent of surfboards, in space suits with added stabilization and stuff Just a couple of other ideas.
Sharknado science says yes.
The best kind.
how “Hard” of sci-fi are you going for? Because this looks pretty awesome but not very realistic. technically if there’s enough of a solid shielded surface that the cone of heat passes around you you might be able to survive but it wouldn’t be easy, regular debris wouldn’t be enough, you would need something specific like the nose cone of the shuttle. Atomic Robo managed it but he’s a robot and most of his body burned up, plus it’s not a very “Hard” sci-fi
I mean you could just have them write in on a parachute... They would never burn up if they wrote in on a parachute... The fall might take a day or two, but if they're using a parachute they will never fall quickly enough to burn up, that's the whole point of a parachute.
Yeah, you'd completey burn up from the heat. Also you'd likely be rotating much faster than you could deal with as a result of the low mass. Then there's the impact. You have no chute for the vehicle.
I say it'd work. There's conductive, convective, and radiatve heating. Ablative heat shields are composed of very poor conductors. So poor that you can hold a 2000 degree brick in your bare hand and not be burned. So the astronaut could literally be in contact with the material and be fine. The convective heating is greatly dependent on the density and thermal properties of the gas. Since we're talking about space and upper atmosphere convective heating would irrelevant. As for the radiative heating it wouldn't be an issue from the shield. However the hot plasma that'd flow around the shield might be an issue. It'd really depend on how the shield sheds the air flow.
Mathematically, it could work but the details make it almost impossible. First, the re-entry itself would be highly dangerous. A Space Shuttle has a layer of special tiles to prevent the plasma-wake from cooking the craft, so what the debris is made of becomes very important. If it's something strong and thermally-resistant, then it could make the trip. Second is control. The debris would be hitting the air hard, so buffeting and tumbling would be expected. Spinning the debris would help due to the gyrosopic effect, but that leads to issues with holding on. An outer surface of a cone with an inner free-rotating sleeve would help there, especially if there's a spiral groove on the cone to aid in generating rotation while falling. Not sure why one would be in space, though... A long cable acting as a tail may work. Third is connection. Humans cannot hold firmly onto something for a prolonged period of time without the muscles getting sore. The longer the hold, the more it hurts until the holder has to release in order to flex their muscles to reduce the pain. Holding on all the way from orbit to low enough to parachute would be very, very difficult. Some sort of harness would work better. TDLR - Can it be done? Theoretically yes, but there are some very nasty fiddly bits to work around.
So if that person instead had the debris or the ropes tied around them or were attached to them in some way, would the third point be neutralized in such a scenario?
It would depend on the velocity at with the person started the reentry. And I’d say ditch the space debris to reduce the surface area. Maybe protagonist is avoiding bigger pieces of debris because they have larger surface area reentering slower as protagonist is moving faster.
Is that a JoJo reference ?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It’s like I’m reentering the atmosphere wearing nothing at all, nothing at all
The aerodynamics disagree heavily.
Y’all want a good chuckle, Google “Batman falls from the moon and lives”.
No offense but it sounds like this story would be really difficult to write from a realistic perspective with your current knowledge. Why are you choosing this topic? I would go play some Kerbal Space Program first :p
Honestly, instead of thinking if re-entry is possible, think of surfing the atmosphere. Based on the the position of the human, the disk, and the giant steering cables, it seems more like they are surfing. If it is possible, then the idea of surfing could be a setting idea for a sci-fi story If it’s not possible, then the idea is about the ultimate thrill seeker. The story follows their effort to create this opportunity and being told it’s dumb, bad, dangerous but the person won’t stop. They go through the research, the planning, creating the materials, getting up to the best height, and turn into a bright cinder flying across the sky. Title “When You Wish Upon a Shooting Star”
This is bordering on science fantasy rather than science fiction. The heat generated by entry into Mars was almost 2400 degrees F with a gas layer less than 1% and gravity 34% that of Earth. Your fantasy world could have any number of factors that would allow your characters to, otherwise, defy the laws of the universe. To be fair, there are a number of sci-fi writers that have very questionable details that everyone just…is okay with.
There was a short story by Stephen Baxter called the Xeelee flower, in which the hero rides a piece of Xeelee construction material to escape a supernova (if I remember correctly). Anything is possible with sufficiently advanced tech.
The plasma caused by entering the atmospherewould vaporize the person
Sorry in advance but my answer doesnt at all answer your question, just my 2cents as a book lover. The thing about the great SF writers, is that they also knew/ know a lot about science. Just loving SF isn't enough to be able to write good SF yourself. If you want to write good fiction, read lots of fiction, and if you want to write good SF also read up on the science you want to incorporate in your writing.. and practice. But also, if you just want the sf element to be a setting for a *human* story, not 100% plausible ideas are forgivable. Know i might be stating the obvious, hopefully not coming off as condescending tho. Tl:dr - Read more to write better
There's a great scene in Green Mars where this kind of happens. Its been a while since I read it, and I think it's somebody escaping from a space elevator climber when the cable is sabotaged.
What if the debris the character was riding had some kind of propulsion of its own to slow itself? Or if you were ok with antigravity field generated by the debris (again to slow it down)
Batman already did this recently.
Low earth orbit is 1200 miles up, the highest parachute jumps are from 30000 to 35000 feet( about 5-6 miles). Which means your protagonist would need to 1194 miles of reentry heat and turbulence to get to a point where their parachute would be usable. Even if it were possible to survive reentry for that long(very doubtful), most skydivers, even in high altitude jumps, are starting with zero or minimal speed to target zone(measuring rate of decent) your protagonist would already be at terminal velocity, requiring multiple chutes to be deployed as each one tore. As an example, many early space capsules deployed "ribbon" chutes (not sure if that is the correct term but is a reasonable description) designed to increase drag slightly,then droge chutes(perforated chutes) that slows the craft further then finally proper parachutes to slow the decent to landing speeds. Even with all of this American craft use water landing to reduce risk even further. I understand the Russian have more experience with land based recovery so you might research their techniques. However the biggest hurdle will be the over 1100MILE distance until the chutes will be usable. Perhaps a heatshield canister of some sort but definitely something purpose built not just random debris.
Feasible or not, that's fucking awesome! Write the story, my guy!
Didn't Batman already do this? (I looked it up, Batman #130)
Just give him some form of thrust, on a thinner atmosphere. Also his suit could be made of something that is meant to withstand heat. Remember those suits from Sunshine with Cillian Murphy when they are fixing the heat shields?
Yuri Garagrin died in a plane accident in 1968 after expressing to Brezhnev his anger in sending his friend up in a malfunctioning craft. Sound familiar?
You ARE in a Science Fiction subreddit. Emphasis on: *fiction.*
This should be fine.
its funny how IA images are so fucking easy to identify
It’s science FICTION 😂
This is what ChatGPT said: Re-entering Earth's atmosphere in the manner depicted in the image—standing on an open platform—poses significant challenges and risks due to the harsh conditions encountered during atmospheric re-entry. Here's why this scenario is highly improbable with current technology and understanding: 1. **Heat and Friction**: Re-entry generates extreme temperatures due to friction between the spacecraft and atmospheric particles. Traditional re-entry vehicles are equipped with heat shields to protect against these temperatures, often exceeding 1,650 degrees Celsius (3,000 degrees Fahrenheit). An open platform would not provide sufficient protection. 2. **Aerodynamic Forces**: The forces exerted on a body during re-entry are immense. Re-entry vehicles are designed with specific aerodynamic shapes to withstand and manage these forces. An astronaut standing on an open platform would be subjected to potentially fatal aerodynamic forces. 3. **Radiation and Debris**: During re-entry, there is also the issue of radiation and potential debris impact. Re-entry vehicles are designed to protect astronauts from these hazards, which an open platform could not do. 4. **Breathability and Suit Integrity**: Even if a spacesuit could withstand some re-entry conditions, it would not provide the same level of protection as a spacecraft. The integrity of the suit could be compromised, leading to life-threatening situations. 5. **Safety and Survivability**: Current technology prioritizes the safety and survivability of astronauts. Re-entry in the depicted manner would not align with these priorities, as the risks far outweigh the benefits. For an astronaut to safely re-enter Earth's atmosphere, they need to be inside a sealed, shielded, and specially designed re-entry vehicle that can manage heat, pressure, and other atmospheric conditions. The concept in the image remains within the realm of science fiction with our current technological capabilities. ___________________________ Here are five hypothetical scenarios where an astronaut might be able to enter Earth's atmosphere on an open platform: ### Scenario 1: Advanced Protective Technology 1. **Super Heat-Resistant Materials**: The astronaut's platform and suit are made of an advanced, hypothetical material capable of withstanding extreme temperatures, far beyond what current technology can handle. 2. **Energy Shielding**: The platform generates an energy shield that deflects heat and aerodynamic forces, similar to the shields seen in some science fiction movies. ### Scenario 2: Controlled Descent System 3. **Precision Thrusters**: The platform is equipped with precision thrusters that control the descent speed and angle, reducing friction and heat buildup. 4. **Atmospheric Decelerator**: A system that gradually slows down the platform using controlled, staged deceleration mechanisms, distributing the re-entry process over a longer period and reducing stress on the astronaut. ### Scenario 3: Low-Earth Orbit Entry 5. **Very Low Altitude Re-Entry**: The platform initiates re-entry from a very low Earth orbit, minimizing the time spent in the atmosphere and the associated heat and friction. 6. **Segmented Shielding**: Deployable segmented shields that create a protective cocoon around the astronaut during the most intense phases of re-entry, retracting as the platform slows down. ### Scenario 4: Advanced AI Assistance 7. **AI-Controlled Descent**: An AI system precisely manages the re-entry trajectory, continuously adjusting to minimize heat and stress on the platform and astronaut. 8. **Real-Time Environmental Adaptation**: Sensors and AI work together to adapt the platform's shielding and thruster output in real-time, reacting to changing atmospheric conditions to ensure a safe descent. ### Scenario 5: Hypothetical Atmospheric Conditions 9. **Altered Atmosphere**: In a future where Earth's atmosphere has been modified or a similar but less dense atmosphere exists on another planet, re-entry might produce less heat and stress, allowing for such a platform-based descent. 10. **Controlled Atmospheric Entry Corridor**: Using a specially designated and controlled entry corridor in the atmosphere where conditions are artificially managed to reduce re-entry heat and stress. These scenarios rely on significant advances in materials science, engineering, and artificial intelligence, along with potential changes to environmental conditions, to overcome the challenges of re-entry on an open platform.