eli5 why wouldn’t atronauts survive a fall from the ISS into the pacific?
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The ISS is travelling at about 18,000 miles per hour with respect to the Earth’s surface. That’s about Mach 40, if I recall correctly. When an object enters the atmosphere going that fast, friction heats it to thousands of degrees, and it burns. It takes a very good heat shield to get a craft down from orbit; it was a small piece of damaged heat shield that caused the shuttle Columbia to burn up and disintegrate when they tried to get back to Earth.
An astronaut, without a craft that has a perfect heat shield, has no chance. They would burn up like a meteor.
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