In various movies, a person finds themselves on a bomb or missile.
To what degree would that effect the aerodynamics of the missile? Of course this is going to depend on the missile, so let’s say:
I’m guessing not at all for the Minuteman given it is so big. But how about the rest?
Assume we ignore the fact that such a person would be blown off, and assume they are fastened tightly in such a way that they cannot fall off:
My WAG is that it would likely increase drag on the side of the missile that they are strapped to, so it would then cause the missile to veer somewhat in the direction that the person is strapped in, since it is an asymmetric drag-inducing object on one side only. If the missile is capable of auto-correcting in flight, though, then it would just be a nuisance, but the missile’s range would be very slightly reduced.
And if the person is waving a cowboy hat while aboard the object, it could increase drag further yet.
If the missile is passing through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed, though, the human might even be consumed and vaporized by the heat of atmospheric friction.
Need answer fast?
This issue has been addressed in the original Captain America theatrical film and by Ask Dr Science!
It works out OK if the missile contains Imipolex G.
Maaaaaaaybe? 
The wind would have blown Slim Pickens off of his nuke after maybe 30 feet.
In True Lies that Sidewinder that Arnie fires with the terrorist hanging from the front would have gone straight down.
Just for the purposes of discussion, lets assume the person has super strength or is attached so firmly that they cannot be blown off.
I’m really just wondering about the aerodynamics.
Operating on the assumption that they are attached to the missile with unobtanium glue which prevents them from being blown off:
Body is vaporized. The Minuteman III has a terminal velocity of 7.83 km/s. The human body wouldn’t survive anywhere near long enough to reach terminal velocity, they’d melt long before exiting the atmosphere.
Same as 1, but maybe lasting a little longer, Pershing II ‘only’ reaches Mach 8-10
The Mk41 is a vertical launching system with cells that can hold a wide range of missile, it’s not a missile system itself. I’d ask for a clarification of the specific missile, but it isn’t going to really matter. Body is incinerated by the booster rocket while leaving the launch cell.
MGM-140 ATACMS has a somewhat similar problem to the Mk41 VLS. Where is the person going to be attached to the rocket inside the launch container? You can get away with this a bit due to the array of missiles that can fit in the VLS cells of the Mk41, some won’t occupy the entire cell so the person would burn up from the booster rocket. ATACMS fills the launch container rather snugly so I doubt you could fit a person inside it. If you can somehow get around this, and have them attached with unobtanium glue, you run into the same problem as the Peacekeeper and Minuteman, just not as severe. The human body isn’t designed to not be torn apart traveling attached to the outside of something traveling at 1km/s.
Nitpick:
It’s not friction heating, it’s compression heating. The high temperatures associated with supersonic/hypersonic flight are due to air slamming into the forward-facing surfaces of the vehicle and being compressed by its own inertia. Similar to what happens inside a piston engine or in the air compressor in your garage, this compression results in adiabatic heating. On a supersonic vehicle, the hottest surfaces tend to be the leading edges and nose. here for example is a temperature map of the Concorde at Mach 2:
Just as a point of note, although the LGM-30G ‘Minuteman III’ (MMIII)and LGM-25C ‘Titan II’ (Titan) missiles are (or in the case of Titan, were) designed as ICBMs, they are totally different classes of vehicle. For comparison, the MMIII is a three stage solid propellant booster with a throw weight (suborbital ballistic payload) of about 2,500 lbm; theTitan was a two stage storable liquid booster with a throw weight of about 8,200 lbm. The Titan II design was the basis for the Titan Gemini Launch Vehicle (GLV) which carried a Gemini spacecraft with two astronauts into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which the MMIII would be completely incapable of doing, and variations on the Titan II design were used as part of the Titan Space Launch Vehicle family (Titan 23G, Titan III A/B/C/D/E, Titan IIIM, Titan 34D, TitanIV). Minuteman motors have been utilized in space launch vehicles but only for smallsat applications, and for target/sounding rocket/suborbital test vehicles.
So, assuming an inert human-shaped lump of mass that remains in place, there would definitely be aerodynamic load effects although it would depend upon where it was on the vehicle. (As this would almost certainly result in a loss of controllability for anything on your list from 2 down, I’ll just address the ICBM-class vehicles.) At subsonic/transonic speeds it will created buffetting that will get more disruptive the faster the vehicle is going, and if on the lower side of the vehicle could create additional unintended lift; on the sides it would tend to cause the vehicle to yaw unexpectedly (to the autopilot). The degree of effect depends upon the location along the airframe and how far it projects out, but it would definitely be noticeable in telemetry and thrust vector control (TVC) response. On upper stages, and especially near the top of the booster where it protrudes outside the shockwave (once the vehicle achieves supersonic speeds in atmosphere), it would probably result in serious if not catastrophic control issues near max-q (the peak dynamic pressure) and likely exceeding the allowable max-q alpha condition (the allowable dynamic pressure x angle of attack), resulting in vehicle instability or exceeding structural margins.
There is an even bigger problem than the aerodynamic loading, though; the presence of a man-sized mass outside of the outer mold line of the vehicle is certainly going to exceed the mass properties allowable tolerances. If the mass is on the first stage for either the Titan or MMIII this probably isn’t a mission-ending condition but the vehicle will effectively lose some impulse because of the additional thrust vectoring to compensate. However, a mass on upper stages will definitely result in high TVC vectoring and likely an uncontrollable stability condition even for rigid body motion, especially as propellant is depleted and the booster becomes lighter. For MMIII it is even worse, because the Stage 2 (SR19) and Stage 3 (SR73) motors have fixed nozzles with liquid injectant thrust vector control (LITVC) that has less command authority (ability to vector the thrust) than gimbaling nozzles and are very sensitive to offset mass; for certain the highly weight optimized SR73 would not be able to recover from staging or fly controllably with an ~80 kg mass on its side. Even if these motors could manage sufficient control authority to compensate for this condition, it would rapidly deplete the injectant fluid in the reservoir, rendering the LITVC system useless and the motor incapable of controlled flight.
There is another issue as well; although most people think of rocket boosters as effectively rigid bodies, they are actually long slender columns that are pushed by a high thrust force at the base, and as a result the wriggle like a worm in flight; this is referred to as modal dynamics and is characterizing this behavior and the frequencies as which it occurs is crucial to controllability (and to a certain extent, the structural capability, although generally any dynamics that are going to break structure are also going to cause the vehicle to lose control even before it breaks apart) as the primary radial modes can make it appear that the vehicle is moving sideways or rotating, causing the guidance system to attempt to correct this apparent rigid body motion. A large outboard mass, especially higher up the vehicle or in a sensitive location will alter the modal dynamics of the vehicle such that the filters that are designed to keep the autopilot from ‘correcting’ the for the flexbody motion are failing to filter out the adjusted modes and put the system into a positive feedback, causing it to go into a tumble. So, even if the aero and rigid body problems don’t cause failure, the adjustments to the modal behavior almost certainly would (on upper stages, at least).
Most of this speed is acquired well above the thickest part of the atmosphere (hence, which space launch vehicles go up at first, and then do a ‘gravity turn’ to gain the necessary speed to achieve a stable orbit). There can still be significant heating due to the high dynamic pressure and shock wave compression even in more rarified atmosphere, and a protruding mass is going to see significantly greater heating due to its blunt profile than the tapered ogive of a missile shroud or payload fairing that are within the supersonic shock wave. But of course, no unprotected person would survive even the initial launch vibroacoustic environment or the extreme shear aerodynamic loads through max-q, so the compression heating that they’ll experience several tens of seconds into flight are pretty much irrelevant even if the vehicle is able to control the flight to that point.
Stranger
Given the practical considerations discussed above, would it help if the man were wearing an iron suit and clinging to the ventral surface of a much slower US fighter jet? Seems like that would throw control off quite a bit, as well as adding a lot of wind noise.
Wow! Thanks for the detailed response. That’s awesome!
@Dissonance I appreciate your response as well. It seems like survivability is a real issue.
As for the Mk41, I thought it was a gravity dropped bomb although I guess it is also the B41 (B41 nuclear bomb - Wikipedia). I picked it because it would be what would likely be dropped by a B-52 (a la Strangelove) despite the visuals not matching in the movie.
Although this post was actually inspired by mumble mumble. … … … Okay it was inspired by “Ernest Joins the Army”, although it did make me think of other movies.
A fighter jet can take off while fitted with a massive quantity of external stores and can jettison all of those stores in flight, and maintain controlled flight under all of these conditions. Having Tony Stark clinging to one of your hardpoints might make a noticeable difference, but it seems unlikely to cause any sort of aviation emergency.
Those bombs tend to tumble when first released before the fins get enough aerodynamic authority to orient it. If you could hang on, it might disrupt the flow enough to keep it tumbling, or might not make a difference. I’m morally certain that no one has ever attempted or seriously considered the “Major Kong” scenario in bomb stability. However, the “World Deaths in Megatons” binder that General Turgidson has on the table in front of him was actually drawn from real studied that guided targeting strategies (although they likely underestimated total deaths). as were a lot of the ideas in dialogue, which were often drawn nearly verbatim from the lectures and essays of nuclear strategist Herman Kahn.
For more:
Stranger
That’s the beauty of the internet and the Dope. We can. 
And will …
Crudely speaking, gravity bombs are designed to be heavy on the front half, with a relatively light fin assembly on the back end. The net result is the static balance makes it want to fall nose first, and the fixed fins tend to dynamically damp any tumbling or coning moment.
One of the big improvements between early WW-II bombs and say Viet Nam era bombs was better aerodynamics and damping which greatly reduced the dispersion of otherwise identical drops. Once they’re designed and built to fall predictably, you can start aiming them at targets rather than just throwing them overboard en masse and hoping at least most of them land in the same county as your target.
Adding a person is a problem. They represent weight that you’d like to have near the front, but they also represent drag that you’d like to have near the back. And their asymmetry is going to make the bomb want to fly sideways or coning. Bottom line is instead of landing where the targetting system expects, you’re going to revisit WW-II and it’ll land in the same county as the target, but other than that not much can be predicted.
OTOH, unlike a WW-II bomb with ~100lbs of high explosive, a modern gravity bomb can back a multi-hundred KT wallop. And if we’re willing to go back to the Cold War B41, 25 megatons of wallop.
As I say in all these sorts of threads, once you’re swingin’ a bat like that, well …
Accuracy? We don’ need no steenkin’ accuracy.
At least not for anything other than counter-nuke hardened bunkers.
True, but Tony was clinging to an F-22 Raptor and most of their weapons systems are stowed internally.
Probably screwed up their stealth capabilities for a few seconds.
So you would agree that the B41 bomb would probably tumble?
I’m totally WAGging here …
I doubt it would tumble, but I bet it would have an erratic wobbly flight that would increase the average cross-track error a lot and also introduce an unpredictable amount of range shortfall. I can’t say it wouldn’t swap ends once or twice, but rapid end-over-end seems unlikely just from inertial arguments.
Remember, the B41 was 4 feet in diameter, 12 feet long, and weighed 10,000 lbs.
A 200# human would add 5% to that weight, and assuming you laid the human prone on top and wrapped their arms and legs around the bomb, the head and torso would be about half that, and in a roughly 3 foot long package, so 1/4th the length of the overall bomb. Adult people are big, but that thing was massive.