If a cow jumped over the moon, how fast would it be going when it got back and hit earth's atmosphere?

Your whish is my command.

From the perspective of the Apollo astronauts, every cow on Earth was jumping over the Moon.

Would the cow become beef jerky if it was a dairy cow?

I heard they raised their children as forks.

This is not true. In rural areas in Zimbabwe, where I grew up, it was not exactly common, but often noticeable for a cow or bull to have a “Y” shape log tied around its neck in order to retard its ability to jump over the typical 4 foot wire farm fences.

And, closer, probably, to Dallas, have you never seen a rodeo cowboy riding a steer?

(An aside. Elands, which are considerably bigger than cattle, can easily clear a 10 foot fence. I mean, sure they are built for speed, but they are very similar herd animals that have just never been domesticated. Wikipedia suggests that can do 8 feet from a standing start.)

Cows are certainly capable of jet propulsion. This was the original ending for Sandra Bullock in Gravity until someone thought of using a fire extinguisher instead.

{ahem}
SDMB Orbital Goat Cannon.

I am so sorry for wondering if the SDMB was losing its way.

I presume you are referring to this thread?

Yes. :cow2: :first_quarter_moon_with_face: :goat:

But the moons gravity can increase its speed and aim it back toward earth.

Perhaps better to consider the cow jumped over the moon, the cow wouldn’t want to go close to the moon, or else careful trajectory adjustment would be required… . We don’t know how many times the cow jumped to above moon altitude but missed the moon before the successful moon jump.

No. Any energy and radial velocity relative to Earth gained by approaching the Moon will be lost when receding from it. A spacecraft might pick up a slight increase in energy and tangental velocity on s trajectory coming from behind the Moon, but because the Moon is only orbiting at 1.022 km/sec and has an escape speed at the surface of 1.4 km/sec, the amount of momentum transfer isn’t going to be much. The cow is ultimately limited to 11.2 km/sec at Earth reentry or else will be on an escape trajectory from the Earth system.

Stranger

If the cow would burn up on re-entry, wouldn’t it also burn up on launch?

It seems to me a matter of synecdoche: using a part of something as a reference for the whole. In this case, the “moon” is a reference to an outhouse (with the moon carved into the door), which makes the whole unbelievable fiasco only slightly less lunicrous (er, ludicrous).

She would burn up upon reentry.

No, because launches take much more time to get up to speed than atmospheric re-entry takes to scrub it. That’s why launched rockets don’t have red hot glowing noses heading into space.

But I suspect a cow would have a hell of a time with the G forces.

Well, some do:

Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 (12,300 km/h; 7,610 mph) in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,427 °C), requiring an ablative shield to dissipate the heat.[2][3] The high temperature caused a plasma to form around the missile, requiring extremely powerful radio signals to reach it for guidance. The missile glowed bright white as it flew.

Ok, technically it wasn’t going to space…

By the time a rocket gets moving fast on ascent it is already above the bulk of the atmosphere; in fact, rockets first fly upward and then perform a ‘gravity turn’ to get oriented to apply impulse to increase tangential velocity, albeit not to reduce heating (although that can occur, especially in depressed trajectories or with hypersonic space planes) but to reduce aerodynamic loads and aeroacoustic vibration environments. Space capsules and meteors are moving at orbital or higher speeds and have to lose all of that kinetic energy, which they do by compressing the air in front of them which produces a superheated ‘sheath’ of plasma that emits intense thermal radiation. It is actually this heating due to “ram pressure”, and not ‘skin friction’ that causes vehicles to experience such intense heat upon reentry.

Of course, a cow that is launched with a single impulse from the surface with no ascent propulsion will have to already have all of the impulse and kinetic energy to loop around the Moon plus enough to overcome atmospheric drag, so yes, the hypothetical leaping cow would actually heat up very quickly during ascent and will promptly explode in a flash of flaming carbon, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous, other trace elements, and superheated steam.

Stranger

The cow was prepared with a heat shield.

Was there any telemetry on Mrs. O’Leary’s cow before she impacted Chicago?