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Comment by Florin_Andrei | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the boiling spit thing, he was rammed at Mach 1 into -57C air at 15km altitude, without wearing some fancy astronaut suit, coming out of a space vehicle disintegrating around him. Then he regained consciousness en route down to Earth and unbuckled the seat. How was the whole ordeal survivable - I can't even begin to imagine.

This is the real man of steel.

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Just did some rough calculations on a different thread about the conditions he would have experienced here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603968

But yeah, he's gotta be the luckiest person alive right now, being the only one surviving a space launch related accident while airborne.

Yeager famously survived an accident with a modified F-104 that was in some ways quite similar to the SpaceX craft (i.e. a plane with a rocket that can fly an arc up out of the atmosphere). Quite a few of these rocket-plane flights were considered spaceflight at the time, though they don't meet the modern (100km) definition.

To clarify, it was a Virgin Galactic craft, not SpaceX.

Bloomberg flubbed that bit. The NASA subject felt the boiling, not the pilot. The next section's heading was a paragraph early and confused me, too.

Interestingly, low altitude supersonic ejection is worse than high altitude.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HecyxhXDepU

Water boiling on the tongue sounds less bad than having your arms and legs blown out of socket.

Fluids are not so fluid - if encountered suddenly at high enough speed.

As anyone who did a belly flop from a high place can testify.

Actually, the water boiling is a sign that probably Nitrogen is boiling off your blood too. Don't want that to happen.

He is not a man of steel. Just his nut sack. And probably depleted uranium is more likely.

Years of experience and training. Thats why he was in that seat in the first place.

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