The Edge of Space
Men and women have left this world and travelled thru space. We've landed on the moon and walked around multiple times with the Apollo Moon Missions. We know a lot about the dangers of space. There is also danger in coming home.
Reentry into the atmosphere has always been perilous. The capsule or space shuttle the astronauts are in hit it at incredible speeds--at up to mach 25 I've read. At that speed your vessel must be protected by a heat shield or else it will melt and disintegrate (the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost this way Feb. 1, 2003 because its heat resistant tile system was compromised).
NASA is currently out of business and not sending manned space ships up. However, some private companies (like Virgin Group Ltd. I believe, founded by Richard Branson) are getting into the space business and will in the future offer travel up to and into space. At some point in time there will probably be space station(s) to journey to & spend time at-like hotels in orbit. The ultimate get-away spot. The ships used to get up there will most likely be much like our current shuttles, or a cross between shuttles and large jet airplanes.
Coming back from a vacation like this will be like taking a plane trip home I suspect & not so very unusual. The only difference being that the place you come home from is in orbit & travelling at thousands of miles an hour around Earth. I just wonder if there were some other way to return instead of in a space vessel. Maybe someone will invent an elevator system. Or maybe transporters like in Star Trek. If you did journey back in a ship & you could slow down enough before reentering the atmosphere it seems to me that you wouldn't be heating up so much. Slowing down obviously means that the gravity of Earth would pull you out of orbit faster. So maybe this isn't possible. I'm not a scientist/physicist/etc. so I can't say for sure. But it's something I've wondered about.
There have been a few men who have tested the limits of how far humans can fall to Earth. The latest and currently the greatest is Felix Baumgartner. You can read about him here on WIKI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner
What he did show us I think is that there are alternatives to reentry into earth atmosphere besides riding it out inside a ship at supersonic speeds and needing a heat shield to stay alive. Of course his alternative was extremely radical and done I think simply to set a world record for skydiving.
You can watch the video here:
Reentry into the atmosphere has always been perilous. The capsule or space shuttle the astronauts are in hit it at incredible speeds--at up to mach 25 I've read. At that speed your vessel must be protected by a heat shield or else it will melt and disintegrate (the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost this way Feb. 1, 2003 because its heat resistant tile system was compromised).
NASA is currently out of business and not sending manned space ships up. However, some private companies (like Virgin Group Ltd. I believe, founded by Richard Branson) are getting into the space business and will in the future offer travel up to and into space. At some point in time there will probably be space station(s) to journey to & spend time at-like hotels in orbit. The ultimate get-away spot. The ships used to get up there will most likely be much like our current shuttles, or a cross between shuttles and large jet airplanes.
Coming back from a vacation like this will be like taking a plane trip home I suspect & not so very unusual. The only difference being that the place you come home from is in orbit & travelling at thousands of miles an hour around Earth. I just wonder if there were some other way to return instead of in a space vessel. Maybe someone will invent an elevator system. Or maybe transporters like in Star Trek. If you did journey back in a ship & you could slow down enough before reentering the atmosphere it seems to me that you wouldn't be heating up so much. Slowing down obviously means that the gravity of Earth would pull you out of orbit faster. So maybe this isn't possible. I'm not a scientist/physicist/etc. so I can't say for sure. But it's something I've wondered about.
There have been a few men who have tested the limits of how far humans can fall to Earth. The latest and currently the greatest is Felix Baumgartner. You can read about him here on WIKI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner
What he did show us I think is that there are alternatives to reentry into earth atmosphere besides riding it out inside a ship at supersonic speeds and needing a heat shield to stay alive. Of course his alternative was extremely radical and done I think simply to set a world record for skydiving.
You can watch the video here:
No comments :
Post a Comment