eli5 why wouldn’t atronauts survive a fall from the ISS into the pacific?
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As many people have said, you are at orbital velocity, and it would take years for the minimal amount of drag in low earth orbit to bring you down. But even then, you would simply burn up in the atmosphere because of how fast you where going. You are going 29KM a sec. The only way you could survive (and this is practically impossible) is to cancel out your relative velocity with a retrograde burn, at which time you would just fall back to earth at a reasonable speed. I dont believe you would gain enough velocity before you hit the atmosphere to cause any burning effect due to atmospheric drag. Once you hit the atmosphere, you wont go faster than terminal velocity, and then a parachute would be all you need to get safely back to the earth’s surface. The reason we rely on the atmosphere to slow us down is because you would need a tremendous amount of fuel in your spaceship to slow you down to a relative speed of zero. That would mean a much larger rocket to get into orbit in the first place, and the price per launch would increase exponentially. Go play Kerbal Space Program for about 100 hours. You wont ever have a question concerning orbital mechanics ever again.
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