Orbital Diving Sport & Safety

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

This is something that I've wondered about for awhile, and is honestly something
I've always hoped would come about, since I would love to dive from orbit,
so this is really cool to me.

Plummeting dozens of miles downward at supersonic speeds with nothing but a spacesuit
on may seem downright scary as hell, but if was that or die with the ship, well most people
would choose to jump.

This technology has a bright future in my opinion, since there are a lot of daredevils and
45 year old men going through middle aged crisis who do it as well as it's benefits in an
emergency evacuation of a ship or station.


Comments, Opinions?

Very cool. I wanna go.

But I'd want to be able to take the spacesuit off as soon as it was humanly possible.

Actually, this could be the ultimate skinny dipping...

I would do that in a heart beat

How long do you reckon it would take for the suit to be cool enough to actually take off after landing though? Imagine surviving the dive but running out of air in the suit cos no one could get you out due to the intense heat!

Also you might land almost any where due to a technical fault - bobing around 1000 miles from land or help?

I'd love to be able to 'buzz' a 747 at high altitude saluting the pilot as I plumet past

Old idea - I give you Da MOOSE!

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Old idea - I give you Da MOOSE!

Rare to see a new one, wouldn't you say?

Bet you wouldn't refuse the chance of a supersonic plunge tho .

I can almost hear my old man now - "whats the point of jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft (okay space shuttle/orditer)" - old fart!

You know, if the system had been tested a few times I might have to think about it. I dunno. I've jumped out of perfectly good airplanes, I even got talked into BASE jumping a couple of times years ago, which given my dislike for the "ground rush" part of the experience was atypical.

Before I got on this thing though, I'd have to have a divorce.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. It would have saved some shuttle astronauts not too long ago.