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Sonic Skydive's Real Aim Is To Help Astronauts Survive
mattnyc99 writes "Earlier this year came reports that Felix Baumgartner (the daredevil who flew across the English Channel) would be attempting to jump from a balloon at least 120,000 feet altitude, break the sound barrier, and live. Now comes a big investigative story from Esquire's issue on achieving the impossible, which details the former NASA team dedicated to making sure Baumgartner's Stratos project will instruct the future safety of manned space flight (including Jonathan Clark, the husband of an astronaut who died in the Columbia disaster). From the article (which also includes pics and video shot by the amateur space photographer we've discussed here before): 'that's also precisely what makes Stratos great. It's more like Mercury than the shuttle: They're taking risks, making things up as they go along. But they're also doing important work, potentially groundbreaking work. They're doing what NASA no longer has the balls to do. Hell, he'd do it for free. He is doing it for free. Stratos only picks up his travel expenses. Clark looks at his friend, shrugs. "This is new space."'"
A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.
However, re-entry is largely a solved problem, whereas high-altitude parachuting isn't. If we had a need for an emergency system to bring astronauts down to 100,000 feet we could probably build a suitable heat-shield and reaction jet control system in a few months, but it won't help if their parachute fails after that.
There might be other options like using some large and light drag device (like a large balloon) to already brake high up in the atmosphere with much less heating. If you can manage to have a large surface area to weight ratio heating can be quite gentle.
There have been calculations that a simple table-tennis ball could survive reentry with no further protection for exactly this reason.
There even have been (russian) tests with inflatable heatshields working in this way. The dense reentry-vehicles with ablating heat shields are mostly a heritage from ICBM technology which depend on going in as fast and straight as possible (they're weapons after all).
Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler
I guess Sherpas don't count?
THL phish sticks