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Sixty miles up, you sit in a chair on the open deck of a small rocket, admiring the stars above, the Earth far, far below. You breathe deeply and leap, somersaulting into the void. You streak into the atmosphere at 2,500 miles an hour. After a thrilling seven-minute plummet, you pull your main chute at 3,000 feet, hands shaking, and glide in for landing.
Sixty miles up, you float easily in the cabin of a small rocket. Suddenly, alarms sound. Space debris has pierced the ship, and it begins to break apart. The captain screams “Go!” over the radio, and pushes you toward the door. You close your eyes and leap, tumbling into the abyss. You spot smoke on the horizon where, a mile away, your ship returned to the ground in an angry hail of twisted metal.
For sport or safety, hurtling to Earth from space without the protective shroud of a heavily engineered space vehicle seems like sheer lunacy. But believe it or not, the physics actually works out. With a heat-resistant space suit and the right kind of chutes, such a daredevil plunge should indeed be possible. While Branson and Bezos are working on getting people into space a company called Orbital Outfitters is working on an innovative way of bringing them back, whether it’s done purely as a sport or as an emergency backup plan in case things go awry. Rick Tumlinson, a longtime civilian space booster who founded the Space Frontier Foundation and helped launch the X Prize Foundation, and Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon who has a unique understanding of the extremes of spaceflight survival, have begun to develop the equipment needed to return you from the heavens without a vehicle.
SOURCE:
Popular Science
Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Old idea - I give you Da MOOSE!