How Bright Would You Be....The REALLY Big Step For a Man Thread

[BigDon]

The paper airplane thread reminded me I wanted to ask this.

Do any of you guys recall the short story, by Asimov I think, where several astronauts are flung into different directions by a catastrophe and the main character has several hours to contemplate his unstoppable spacesuit-only re-entry? Can't recall the name at the moment.

I was reminded of it by a cut-scene in a Star Wars game on the X-box where it shows one of the clones falling away from a "sinking" space station towards a planetary surface as he reachs out like a drowning man.

This got me thinking. I saw a very bright meteor one night while camping in the wilds o' Northern California. Brightest I'd ever seen and I've spent a lot of nights on a flight deck. It cast distinct shadows and the light reflecting off of me lit up the faces of the people facing me, who missed it. One of my fellow campers, who taught colledge physics said, "Ooo that was a big one, probably between hazelnut and walnut size." I recall the light was white.

Now I know from my Navy fighter squadron days humans do very poorly structural-wise at wind speeds over 400 knots. (Out of the envelope for safe ejection) So I don't expect I would burn out as a single unit 'til I got down to a nubbin. I expect it would be like one of those "shotgun" showers you see once in a while or in fireworks displays.

So I have a bad day in space. Out on a geosynchronous station 300 miles up over Kansas City, Kansas. At 2 AM so its dark on both coasts. And I started my fall straight down.

Would I been seen from both coasts?

Here are my layman assumptions.

I'll start incandesing sooner and higher than the aforementioned walnut sized lump of iron due to my larger surface areas, most of which will be new, as I conform to several new, more excitingly aerodynamic shapes.

Anything surviving re-entry (femur heads, lumbar vertibra, and molars) will end up in Virginia, or possibly the Atlantic. Or both.

Now the reentry speed thing is throwing me here. I don't *think* I'll get anywhere near the speed of the meteor I saw that night merely from orbit so I could be deluded as to most of my imagined light show. I do expect my lard butt to compress a lot of air on the way in though.

Would it make a difference in brightness if I was falling into a receding Earth or an approaching Earth? Or would that be only a factor at already meteoric speeds?

I'll stop now. I have another idea for another thread.

BD

[ABR.]

Do any of you guys recall the short story, by Asimov I think, where several astronauts are flung into different directions by a catastrophe and the main character has several hours to contemplate his unstoppable spacesuit-only re-entry? Can't recall the name at the moment.

I can't recall an Asimov story dealing with this scenario -- I'm sure I'll remember once I've posted this. However, it sounds a lot like the ending of the movie Dark Star to me. I believe that Alan Dean Foster did the novelization.

[01101001]

Out on a geosynchronous station 300 miles up over Kansas City, Kansas. At 2 AM so its dark on both coasts. And I started my fall straight down.

Would I been seen from both coasts?

No way. You'd interact with the atmosphere way too low to be visible from both coasts -- which wrap considerably around the globe, must be at least 50 degrees.

(By the way, 300 miles is nowhere near geosynch orbit, but if we raise you up, you're even farther away from hitting the atmosphere and starting to warm up. If you were really at geosynch altitude, about 23000 miles up, and fell straight down -- difficult because it requires losing lots of velocity -- you would be going fast, at least, but the vast majority of your travel would be above the atmosphere.)

Here's a body that came in from deep space on the big fall: the Stardust sample return canister. On the reentry tracking map (http://reentry.arc.nasa.gov/elevation.jpg), notice the fairly narrow corridor of visibility when it first begins to glow over the west coast: from (west of) Bakersfield, California to Surrey, British Columbia, where it was seen both places just 5 degrees up from the horizon. It didn't even cover the contiguous US the narrow way.

(In Silicon Valley, it flitted between the trees, barely visible, maybe 12 degrees up. Similar conditions to the north would only be around Portland, Oregon.)

[BigDon]

ABR. I did read a lot of Alan Dean Foster as a kid, Along with Robert E. Howard, Asimov, Niven, Jack Vance, *A* Norton, Micheal Moorcock, Heinlien, Burroughs (except the Venus series. I could never find the first one.) etc, etc.

Dad was into good science fiction and my older brother liked science fiction and good fantasy so I was lucky enough to have had a large, quality fiction librairy to start with when I finally got interested in reading for entertainment. I believe it was about fifth grade I started.

Thank you 011, I am now officially less stupid.
This makes up for the points I lost reading the Galeleo Was Wrong! thread.

If you ever need advice on keeping alive anything aquatic, from koi to coral, feel free to give me a pm.

[hhEb09'1]

It cast distinct shadows and the light reflecting off of me lit up the faces of the people facing me, who missed it. I was having a beer outside with a bunch of neighbors one night and saw their faces light up, and at the look in their eyes, I thought, d*ng, I missed it. :)

It was reported the next day as visible from Maryland to South Carolina, but it was heading south.No way. You'd interact with the atmosphere way too low to be visible from both coasts -- which wrap considerably around the globe, must be at least 50 degrees.I think 50 degrees is about the difference in longitude, but at higher latitudes the longitudinal degrees are smaller. Not much. :)
On the reentry tracking map (http://reentry.arc.nasa.gov/elevation.jpg), I get a server availability error now, maybe I have to login at the NASA main page (http://www.nasa.gov/)? That'd be a cool map.

[Nowhere Man]

Do any of you guys recall the short story, by Asimov I think, where several astronauts are flung into different directions by a catastrophe and the main character has several hours to contemplate his unstoppable spacesuit-only re-entry? Can't recall the name at the moment.
Not Asimov, but Ray Bradbury. Can't remember the title.

Fred

[schlaugh]

Was it The Long Way Home? I remember the plot but not the details nor title.

[01101001]

I get a server availability error now, maybe I have to login at the NASA main page (http://www.nasa.gov/)? That'd be a cool map.

Reentry map (http://reentry.arc.nasa.gov/elevation.jpg) still works for me. I don't log in.

NASA Hypervelocity Reentries (http://reentry.arc.nasa.gov/) has an inline thumbnail of the Stardust map, and a link to the same I gave.

http://reentry.arc.nasa.gov/elevationsmall.jpg (http://reentry.arc.nasa.gov/)

[ABR.]

Not Asimov, but Ray Bradbury. Can't remember the title.

Fred

That did the trick -- Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury. The story can be found in the Illustrated Man. At the end of the story, a little boy was able to make a wish on the "falling star".

BigDon, I can match all the names on your list including ERB's Venus series. My introduction was an older cousin who let me look at his SF collection over Christmas break once. He gave me three books: a Norton, an Anderson and a Niven if I remember correctly. My Grandfather added Heinlein's Starman Jones and now 30+ years later the floor sags under the weight of overflowing bookshelves.

[astromark]

My view of this... pun intended. Is that if your path is straight in and from a orbiting body that would be near to impossible. Drop some thing from a Geo-stationary orbit and it would orbit for ever. To fall back to Earth a great deal of orbital velocity would need to be lost. To fall away from the orbiting ISS or re enter from orbit would result in a burn up in the upper atmosphere as the orbital velocity of some 39,000 km/hr. As the human body comprises mostly of aqueous mater ( water ) a lot of vaporising and not so much to actually burn. Head and helmet and pelvic bone...and teeth. No, Just ashen dust and water vapour... not a bright re entry for a corps. :( Why are we dwelling on this? :)

[KaiYeves]

Interesting idea. I had a story where a hero who controls fire got the bad guy to chase him in the upper atmosphere, and flew straight down. The hero could take the heat, because of his powers, but the villian was (litterally) toast.