I’ve heard some of my ancestors tried jumping over the moon, so it got me thinking. Let’s say I don a parachute, some sort of breathing aparatus and have a cannon powerful enough to shoot me around the world. Could I survuve such a trip, or would the trauma of being shot out of a canon and the massive g-forces be too much for my bovine deitiness? How big of a canon would I need? Or do I need something bigger than a cannon to send me up? (The thought of endless free-fall is just so cool!)
“I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”-- Calvin and Hobbes
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Basically, no. You’ve got to get high enough that air resistance isn’t a problem (otherwise you wind up like Skylab), and you’ve got to hit orbital velocity once you get there (ignoring for a moment how you go from a ballistic trajectory to a stable orbit without some kind of impulse once you’re out of the atmosphere). We’re talking miles per second here; you’d be turned into jelly if that were applied all at once.
I think the friction of going through the atmosphere would do evil things to you anyway.
If you had some kind of capsule to protect you from air resistance, and if you could spread out the launch force (using something like a really long rail gun, for example)… it might work. Then again, if you’re going to go to that much work you might as well just build a rocket, which we KNOW could put you into orbit.
My error. I just reread the question, and you’re talking about once around, not a stable orbit.
Okay. Let’s assume you go high enough to avoid intervening solid objects, and let’s neglect air resistance (which is going to be a killer… it’s really not fair to neglect this… but I’m not an AeroE type so I don’t know how to factor it in).
The Earth’s radius is about 6400 km, which means that to reach orbital velocity just above the surface you need to go just under 7900 meters per second, which is a little under 5 miles per second. It does drop a bit as you go higher, but not really enough to matter as far as you’re concerned. You’re still going to be jelly.
Torq, you missed the part of ITCGM’s question that said he’d be shot out of a cannon. That’s makes it impossible right there; the initial G-forces required to boost CowGod to escape velocity, overcome wind resistance, and still have enough oomph to put him into orbit would turn him into cow pate’.
Let’s say that you use a balloon. Before the pair that recently made the once around for the first time in history there was another group was also trying for the round the world. That second group was going to go much higher, edge of space kind of higher, where they wouldn’t have to worry about those pesky weather systems. They didn’t bother, you might be able to get yourself a high altitude balloon cheap, take the once around and still keep your godlike physique.
