Re:Could someone jump from the international space station a...
by pyre on Thursday October 25, 2012 @10:44AM
(#4697810)
9m/s is velocity. How does this 'add up' over a distance?
Re:Could someone jump from the international space station a...
by gvb on Thursday October 25, 2012 @11:43AM
(#4698015)
That is a typo, it should be 9m/s^2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_gravity#Altitude (gravity at the earth's surface is 9.8m/s^2, the link states it is 90% of that at the ISS).
Things burn up on re-entry because of the tangential speed of the craft (laterally through the increasingly thickening atmosphere as distance to ground increases), not because of the plummet composition of the velocity vector.
If someone could manage a strait jump from that height without forward velocity (in relation to the Earth's rotating frame), I suspect they'd be in freefall (without a normal terminal velocity) until they hit the atmosphere, at which point they'd probably be going pretty fast (9m/s for a few hundred kilometers adds up) and would have some severe heating issues to deal with.