Welcome to 100 Ways to Die in Space
Hi there bloggies, welcome to a new and fun little feature – 100 ways to die in space. Taking inspiration from a million ways to die in the west I’ll be taking a somewhat tongue in cheek at the many and various ways that space is somewhat unkind to the average human being and it pretty effective at killing them very quickly. Step aboard and see what happens, just don’t come on wearing a red top!
Method 2 – Moving too Fast.
There’s no controversy on this one, this belongs right here in the annals of 100 ways to die in space. It’s important to note at this point that there’s not many ways to brake and slow down in space. Doing this usually involves complex mathematics to use a large body like a planet to slow a spacecraft, either that or using quite a lot of fuel as reverse thrust.
There are more obscure ways to slow down a spacecraft, like for example jettisoning the iar from the spacecraft in a explosive way. Thi is not generally advised and and usually means that one of the other methods of dying in space comes into play, but that’s for another time.
At first thought one might think that going too fast in space is a good thing, the passengers get there faster and it’s happy days. This is true to a point but there’s still that bothersome issue of slowing down again and if you’re going really fast you might miss the target all together. I know in these strange times that might not be considered a bad thing. Let’s not forget though that we have carefully managed the supplies of pork pies, beer bottles and gorilla suits to get out this far and not crash back down to Earth, so our poor over excited explorers will only last a matter of days before running out of food and drink and that’s if the air scrubbers don’t pass out first.
On the more extreme side it’s been suggested in historical sci-fi stories that the way to get into space and to the Moon is to load up the passengers into a large shell and shoot them from a huge cannon. At 1000’s of G’s the human body would experience doing this there wouldn’t be much left except a pool of warm goo, but let’s not dwell on that.
This same problem is thought to happen when, if possible the human race has found a way to travel faster than light. We’ve not really got that far yet so let’s not worry about it for now. But even if they did they still need to make sure the speed they travel at means they will hit their moving target of a distant star at the right time so it’s always best to not keep one’s right foot on the loud pedal too much!
© Simon Farnell 2013 – 2023
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Simon's Space 
If I ever write a spacey Sci-fi I’m just going to ignore physics completely. That’s a legit work around to the problem, right?
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Yes it is, in fact scifi writers do it al the time especially when it comes to time travel.
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I always get very stressed watching space movies where someone is outside the spacecraft and has to use their thrusters to get back–one wrong move and it’s ‘lost in space’!
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I know it’s a pretty tense thing, that and you have to remember that everything in space is moving and our brains can’t handle all of it, so eyeballing the target is really trick becasue you need to be aiming for where the thing will be when you reach there.
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Another way to die in space…..thinking too much of how to die in space, lol.
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Well there’s 98 to go 😂
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I read somewhere that NASA had to scale back the engines for the space shuttle. The initial engine specifications would have been too powerful. Not so powerful that they would have killed the astronauts (probably), but the astronauts would definitely have blacked out.
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I didn’t know that, makes sense I guess.
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Way number 3; going by Han’s calculations to make the jump to light speed, then flying too close to a star or bouncing too close to a supernova 😀
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Well exactly, these things can happen when you’re going too fast… 😀
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