Sorry for broken english I hope you understand me 🙂
I was wondering if its possible to shoot a handheld weapon or something “easy to get” and shoot it from Earth to get the bullet to hit the oxygen free space.
Is it even possible in any way or is it near impossible?
If so can this bullet become a high risk object that could damage or even destroy satellites once its in space?
Did we ever launch something to space without propelling it all the way up there? (once propelled on earth it doesnt get any more help flying up there)
In: Physics
There is a legend how nuclear explosion test once launched a manhole cover into space.
While it certainly had the initial velocity to overcome gravity and go to space, more realistically it was just vaporised by atmosphere resistance and the force of blast.
Not likely.
A conventional handgun can’t do it. The projectiles just don’t go fast enough. Shooting a bullet vertically is a really, really, *really* bad idea. They won’t make it into space, but they will come back down with considerable speed. This kills people occasionally.
But *could* we build a really stupid big gun and make it work? Maybe.
The big problem is that the projectile would have to move at hypersonic velocities. Assuming you could make a projectile go this fast, it would encounter considerable air resistance. You know how a space-ship gets really crazy super hot as it re-enters the atmosphere? That’s what would happen in reverse. But worse. A space-ship orbits at ridiculously fast speeds, and then slows down on re-entry. A projectile shot into orbit would have to FINISH at that ridiculous speed, which means it would have to be going even faster when it leaves the gun. There is a good chance the projectile would just be destroyed on the way up.
Someone actually tried this in the 1960’s. The projectile got up to 110 miles, which is pretty damned high but not high enough to be in ‘space.’
The velocity needed to get outside the atmosphere from the ground surface is around 11.2km/s, or mach 33.
As far as I know, there is no gun capable of shooting a bullet at Mach 33. The fastest is only Mach 6.
Even if you had that kind of speed, the bullet would likely disintegrate due to the massive resistive force from the air at such a high speed.
Lets take the speed of a 9mm bullet to be 380m/s (metres per second).
Escape velocity from earth is around 11.18573km/s (kilometres per second).
11185.73 / 380 = how much faster a 9mm will have to go in order to reach terminal velocity which is about 29.4 times faster.
However, the explosive energy to launch this projectile to that speed will be far far greater than 29.4 times.
And since there is an equal and opposite reaction, having a hand-held device that can contain the explosion… you will probable have the gun recoil at the speed of a 9mm bullet.
Tldr: Staying close to anything that will reach terminal velocity will have a terminal outcome
would using other material then normal bullets are made of elimate the problem of too high temperature and burning down?
Space shuttles use strengthened carbon or ceramics to protect form overheating.
If we would made a bullet out of that would it solve the problem or is it more complicated and it still would burn down because of its small size?
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