Bovine Space Program · 9:33pm Oct 29th, 2018
Here’s a cartoon from a while back:
Jumping over the moon is an impressive feat for a cow, so we should certainly applaud this cos-moo-naut for getting as far as she did. In order to launch herself on a trajectory out of the gravitational-potential-well of the Earth, and reach an altitude clear of lunar orbit, she would have to kick off with a speed of over 11km per second, requiring an acceleration of some hundred million g acceleration. Break a leg super-cow!
While she could happily cruise above the moon, conservation of energy will ensure that she will return to Earth with the same speed she left, and as several hundred kilos of cow ram into the upper atmosphere at speed, the result is barbecued beef.
It is an open question why she wasn’t toasted during ascent, as the speeds would be the same. Perhaps she took a balloon to some high altitude cloud, before taking the final leap into the void. Possibly while sailing through space, admiring the view, she would realise that rockets are a better option than jumping, allowing a continuous acceleration until you reach the near-escape-velocity, so you pass through the the atmosphere at slower speeds. And if you have some fuel left, you can fire retro on return to slow your descent.
Every space program has suffered setbacks on the route to the final successful mission.
For those romantics who want a true jumping-over-the-moon story, without violating the laws of physics too much, can we find a way to bring our bovine pioneer back to Earth safety? Well perhaps a clever cow could aim close enough to the moon to complete a manoeuvre using its gravity to change course, so instead of falling back to Earth, she will skim the edge of the atmosphere, allowing her to lose speed without burning up, and once stationary, she could open a parachute to let her fall safely her home. The delicate adjustments to her trajectory at apogee could be done by squirting a little milk from an udder, thereby changing her momentum in line with with Newton’s third law, and providing some raw material for the lunar cheese industry.
It would required a more detailed mathematical model than I have time to do to see if this would actually work. It may well just be a fairy tale.
I was thinking that exuding water based liquids during reentry would create a liquid gaseous ablative insulation layer, like that for rocket engines but only needs to be a couple percent the capacity?
Some japanese crey have claimed modeling of a porous alumina chamber filled with water to create the thermal absorbing boiling and steam layer generator in one. After all, once you reach 100 C temp, you have very close to that of Concorde hull, which is manageable?
Obviously, cows need to aerobrake during their descent.
Cos-moo-naut? Did you write this article just for that pun?
Interestingly, a simillar question has been asked... No barbecued beef, alas.
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Frankly, I’ve always thought that the cow intended to lithobrake all along.
How udderly complicated.
It is almost the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8. If humans can do it, ¿why not cows?
I mean, that's not untrue, but non-gaseous, macro-scale propellant just contributes to the Kessler problem.
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I'm pretty sure that once she does that, the milk would vaporize instantly in the vacuum, so it's not as much an issue. However, the mental image of the ISS being damaged by a high-velocity milk is a pretty funny one!
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… well, guess it's time to go to the experts then!
And it turns out, after some web research, the question of "boil or freeze" is a complex question, with a tl;dr answer of "Yes?" This is probably about the best short summary we're going to get, and it cites a Straight Dope article citing astronauts who have dumped urine out into space:
The big question, then, is whether the crystals are sufficient to cause microabrasions on space gear. Hard to say, but I'm erring on the side of caution because there was a famous incident where Challenger got a millimeter-sized pit in its windshield after collision with a fleck of paint.
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Dang, yeah, you're probably right! I completely forgot that the liquid would go through deposition(?) and become ice. Pretty neat.
"Killed by milk" isn't a very flattering tombstone message.
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It'd give the old advertising slogan "Got Milk?" a whole new meaning!