would this work /sci/?
>>7708710
Supposing that the ship he jumps off is already in orbit he'd most likely just enter an orbit himself.
If you're in orbit, you're not going to do anything, a slight push towards Earth will just put you in an eccentric orbit (a retrograde push at apoasis would be more effective but you'd need a cannon rather than some helpful friends). If you're being held in place by giant engines, you'd fare better with a couple of parachutes (a supersonic drogue followed by a larger one to carry you below a fatal impact velocity) than a barrel. Personally, I'd rather have a MOOSE.
supposing it were to enter atmosphere, wouldn't he just burn up?
No, since angular momentum in conserved.
>>7708847
I'm not from around these parts. Care to explain why that would work, is it because it's airtight?
>>7708710
I guess it'd be kinda like taking a barrel over the magma version of Niagara Falls
>>7708735
Is it possible to somehow de-orbit without any rocket?
If gravity is a particle why would things orbit?
>>7708967
because thats what it does
dont really have an answer for you anon
>>7708851
Don't think of people in orbit as floating in space, they're actually flying around the Earth at an extremely high speed. The International Space Station, in low earth orbit, is traveling at 7.7km/s and it's 400km from Earth's surface.
Pushing the spaceman-in-a-barrel "down" at one meter per second doesn't alter that forward speed. He'll hit the upper stratosphere (18km high) in about 382,000 seconds: 106 hours, or a little more than four days. At that point, still traveling perpendicular to the surface at thousands of miles per second, he'll burn up in the atmosphere.
>>7708984
"miles per second" Pfff. Change that to "meters per second".
>>7708986
km means kilometers you mongoloid
From that far, you would probably form an orbit with an apoapsis too far away to return in any survivable amount of time, but you would eventually return to earth.
Suppose you're on a spaceship with a circular orbit at height [math]h[/math] m above earth and you throw the barrel towards earth at a speed of [math]v[/math] m/s towards earth.
Then the eccentricity of the barrels orbit would be [math]e=v \sqrt{\frac{h}{GM}} [/math] and the lowest point in the barrels orbit is given by [math]h \frac{1}{1 + e}[/math].
Given that the outer atmosphere is 100km thick and the earth's radius is 6367.4447km we require that [math]v[/math] be approximately [math]\frac{3.08699h - 1.9975*10^{7}}{sqrt{h}}[/math] m/s.
A typical medium earth orbit is around 2000 km, meaning that [math]v[/math] would need to be 2030 m/s. That's 4543 miles per hour. They will not be able to accelerate the barrel to this speed by pushing it out by hand.
Given that the average weight of barrel is 13.5 kg and a man is around 80kg we have that the energy required to push this man out of the space craft so that he makes contact with earth's atmosphere is around 192.7 MJ. This is comparable to the energy in 1.5 gallons of gasoline, so if he straps a small propulsion system to the barrel he could make it to earth.
>>7708710
You can't throw something down from orbit.
You need serious rockets to deorbit a person.
