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Sub-Orbital Skydiving
igz writes: "Someone is trying to set the world record for highest freefall, from over 31 miles above the Earth! There is no atmosphere up there, so speeds of up to 1.5 Mach are expected. Check it here." Whether this is insanity or courage is up to you, but it sure sounds like a fun ride. Cheryl Stearns is the insane / courageous diver, and she will jump wearing a pressure suit to counter the lack of air at (gulp!)165,000 feet up.
A simulation of the Kittinger dive is on the NOVA website. Plus they also show the famous picture of him jumping out of the gondola.
Also there is a really great book written by Craig Ryan called The Pre-Astronauts. The Pre-Astronauts is all about the history of high altitude skydiving. A cool quote by Alan Shepard from the book when asked if he would have done the Kittinger jump: "Hell no. Absolutely not."
Another cool fact is that Capt. Kittinger's boss during those high skyjumps was no other than John Paul Stapp the guy who is always in those famous pictures and movies of the rocket sled. Remember those pictures of a man's face being progressively made more distorted by g-forces? That's John Paul Stapp!
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
However, in the interests of science, I think she should take the risk of shouting it briefly just before reaching Mach 1, so she can be able to hear herself going "oooooooominoreG" shortly after.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
At what point do you need to stop worrying about oxygen, so much as worrying about re-entry friction?
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This would be an amazin accomplishment, but it should be noted that this would not be the first dive from an altitude high enough to require a pressure suit. Forty years ago Joseph Kittinger made a succesfull jump from 103,000'. A quick google search turned up some sites with info on him and his jump. Check some of them out:
Here
and
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HereDan
Pressurized suit: $20,000
Extremely high altitude flight: $15,000
Used parachute: $40
Patches for parachute: $5.37
Being the first person to achievesubterranean supersonic travel: priceless.
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Several Million, B.C: great lizards known as "Dino-saurs" were rendered extinct by the impact of a meteorite off the Yucatan.
2000: Parachutist Cheryl Stearns achieves the first sub-orbital skydive, with mixed results. When she reached Mach 1.5, Cheryl vanished, never to be seen again.
2020: It has been determined that Cheryl Stearns, upon breaking mach 1.5, travelled through time, and smashed into the Yucatan. The resulting clouds and debris led to the extinction of all dinosaurs.
Not quite -- due to decreasing air temperature, the speed of sound actually decreases as you go up for a while, then increases again until you hit near-vacuum.
- Sea level -- 1116 fps
- 36000 to 82000 feet -- 968 fps
- 150000 feet -- 1075 fps
- 250000 feet and up -- by a quirk of physics, 1116 fps again!
NASA has a nice web tutorial on this topic. Greg Roth has a more precise javascript calculator.You think that's wacky? In the early 60's, there were a number of designs for a single-person bailout device, for "bailing out" from *orbit*. MOOSE was one such design, where the astronaut was enclosed in a foam shield.
:)
Mach 1.5, bah! Try Mach *25*!
The problem here isn't so much traveling at Mach 1.5 (I'm sure the pressure suit is well insulated and heat resitant to avoid the cold and the heat) but its the point where she breaks the sound barrier. After that, it should be smooth sailing, since she's passed her own shockwave. However, I still do not belive this will be a considerable problem. remeber, an airplane is many many times more massive than a human being. It will generate a much much more powerful shockwave which it will then have to overcome once it approaches the speed of sound. A single human woman isn't going to have this problem. In addition, remeber, surface area for objects is typically a in a higher ratio to mass for less massive objects (i.e humans) than massive objects (i.e. jet aircraft). For a simple experiment in this, throw an ant, a cat, yourself, and a horse down a 100ft mine shaft. The ant is going to hit the ground with little to no damage. The cat may break a leg or too, but will live. You will more likely than not die. The horse will splatter. Same thing applies to the drag forces about the fusalage of a plane and about this woman. Its going to be relatively much less for the woman.
We're all under the illusion that there is a such thing as perpetual freefall. 31 miles up! That's going to add some freefall time to your log book! Let's see. My charts stop at 15k feet. Assuming you open at 2500 ft, that's somewhere around 75 seconds of freefall, through approximately 2.5 miles of very thick air. I wonder how long this jump will last?
I'm sure that the danger that they refer to is related to the thinness of the air. Without air blowing by you, you can't control which way your body is turning. If you can't control that, then you can't prevent a spin. That would be bad.
BTW, Cheryl Stearns is among the elite skygods. She's got a gazillion jumps, and a bunch of style and accuracy championships. She's been a fabulous ambassador to the sport, and should rightfully be credited as one of the sport's most important participants.
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Seems like there's not much left to do after something like this. I suppose some nuts will try to set a new record by having sex while they jump from 31 mi. up.