Would it be possible to skydive through our atmosphere and survive with future technology?
If you mean re-enter the atmosphere from orbit and land safely, yes, it’s possible now. During the research for the U.S. space shuttle, the problem came up of “How do we recover 8 people if we have to get them back to earth, as the largest spacecraft in the U.S. inventory besides another shuttle will only hold 3 people?” Because of the extended turnaround time on getting the shuttles ready for space, it normally wouldn’t be possible to send another shuttle up. This is especially true now that we have lost 2 of them. (They originally intended to always have one available for a “crisis flight” for launch within 48 hours of a problem, but that went away when the Challenger blew up. Now we have lost 2 of them, so that is no longer even an option.) They could ask the Russians, but their launch schedule is not much faster than ours, or we could ask the European Space Agency, but I don’t know what it would take for them to launch quickly, and in any case, at the time the Shuttle program was r
