This thread over in GQ made me think of an SF short story I read along time ago:
A space ship blows up in the solar system and the crew, wearing space suits, is drifting in space. They gradually start going in different directions, depending on where they were at the time the ship blew up. It ends with one of them ré-entering eartj’s atmosphere and a child saying « Look! A falling star! »
Two questions:
1 can anyone Id this story?
2 would the crew all drift in different directions? Wouldn’t they all still be going roughly in the same trajectory as the spaceship was going?
I’ve read it. I think Ray Bradbury. Don’t have a sufficiently specific memory to tag the name of the tale, but I suspect it to be within S is for Space or else R is for Rocket.
I’m no physicist but I think directional velocity is extremely depending on little things like whether or not a nearby chair bumped into you as your space-suited body got ejected.
Yes and no. They would all start with the trajectory of the ship, but depending on what happened as they were ejected there would be (probably relatively minor) variations. Even relatively minor initial variations might make them drift apart a long way over time.
Minor variations absolutely would make them drift apart over time. When you’re in space, with very little to slow you down, even a small difference in velocity (speed or direction) will just accumulate over time.
The story is Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury. It first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the October 1949 issue, and was collected in the Bradbury anthology The Illustrated Man that first came out in 1951.It’s been anthologized many times since
In 1975 Bradbury turned it into a play (published in Pillar of Fire and other Plays). It’s been performed numerous times, in settings very simple (spotlights on each player in a darek theater) to very elaborate (suspended astronauts in suits in front of a starfield). Eventually it got made into a film in 2012 – Ray Bradbury's Kaleidoscope (Short 2012) - IMDb
I also have to point out that this situation also occurs at the end of the 1974 movie Dark Star – Dark Star (film) - Wikipedia
This actually gets pretty interesting. If you are in orbit around something, your orbital distance is based on your speed. If you’re on a spaceship orbiting the sun and you throw trash towards the sun, it won’t go into the sun. It will come back up and hit you. Since you threw it towards the sun but didn’t change its speed, it’s going to go in a somewhat elliptical orbit, so if you are in a circular orbit it’s going to be beneath you at first, then will come back and hit you, and if it misses then it will oscillate between being below you and above you.
Now if you are blown forward or backwards relative to the ship’s path of motion when the ship goes kablooey, then you are going to be slightly accelerated or decelerated in your orbit, so your orbit is either going to want to increase or decrease its orbital distance respectively. The difference is probably going to be pretty slight. To get enough of a change in orbital velocity to dramatically change your orbital distance from a single quick kablooey is probably going to impart enough force on your body to turn you into a pink mist.
The unfortunate space travelers aren’t just going to drift apart, unless they are in deep space and aren’t in orbit around anything.
The example of the sun orbit was what I was thinking of. If I remember correctly, one of the spacers is said to be heading towards the Sun, but I’ve learnt from the SDMB that it takes a lot of energy to head towards the Sun.
Suppose that the ship is initially in orbit around the Earth (because that’s pretty much necessary, for any of them to end up as shooting stars). The explosion presumably gave each of the astronauts an instantaneous delta-V in a random direction. Every one of the astronauts will eventually orbit back to the same spot where the explosion occurred (if they don’t hit something else first), so in that sense, they won’t drift apart… except that each of them will have a slightly different orbital period, so while they’ll all get back to that point, they won’t all get back to it at the same time. From the perspective of any one of the astronauts, they’d see the others getting further away until they lost contact (assuming only a moderate range on their in-suit communications, because there’s no reason for them to be designed to work over more than a few hundred meters), and then never see them again.
There’s no realistic way to have them hitting multiple celestial bodies. You could maybe contrive a way to hit two, if you were really trying, but that’d require that you be far enough away from both that both would be extremely small targets. Even with contrivance, you couldn’t get three.
