On Sun, 21 May 2017 13:06:01 -0400, JF Mezei wrote:

On 2017-05-21 05:27, Fred J. McCall wrote:


And dies from being sliced to ribbons by bungee cords and jellied
against the sides of the capsule.

Precisely what phase of re-entry would cause that?


Seats. With restraint systems. And shock absorbers. You don't seem
to understand that a capsule reentry can be a fairly violent trip as
such things go.

Which was the goal of my question, but you respond with silly arguments
such as "jellied against the sides of the capsule".




You're talking about peak deceleration of 3g-5g with
random hard jolts in random directions. It's not a nice smooth trip
like you seem to think it is.

Hard jolts? looking at space shuttle re-entry videos, the crew didn't
seem any rougher than on a bus.

Which is the difference between a lifting re-entry by a winged vehicle,
(Well, OK, some other non-winged shapes do perform lifting re-entries
while hypersonic - the Apollo CM, and the Soyuz (Much of the time)
and a ballistic re-entry where your're plummeting out of the sky like a
badly thrown rock.
A shuttle re-entry was typically around 3 Gs. A Soyuz or Apollo, as Fred
says, 5-6. A fully ballistic descent, peak Gs of around 9-12 G,
sustained over a fairly significant period of time (As in multiple 10s of
seconds - when you effectively weigh 2000# (900 Kg), that's damage time.
I've pulled significant Gs in airplanes - good seats, solid structure,
secure (As in a 200 lb crew chief helping haul on the shoulder straps to
get them properly tight) and a G-suit, and you can tolerate High Gs for a
while - _If_ you know that they are coming, what direction they're going
to be, and G onset isn't too sudden.
Rattling around in a jackleg rig is just not going to work.
Think of it this way - one of the biggest killers in airliner crashes has
been seat failure - the relatively low impacts of a crash landing break
the seats away from the structure and impact with bulkheads or the seats
in front of you kills you.

Frankly, you'd be better off with something like MOOSE - (Man Out Of
Space, Easiest) - explored in the early '60s as an "Orbital Parachute" -
A system with a retro-rocket that encapsulates a suited astronaut in an
ablatable capsule, which will, if properly aimed, give you a chance to
use a personal parachute over the right continent.


It isn't like there are flying pigs that get hit by the capsule during
re-entry, is it ?

No, just gravity turns into dense air at high speeds.
You don't need pigs then.

--
Pete Stickney
Struggle no more! I'm here to solve it with ALGORITHMS!