What If You Dropped a Steak From Orbit?

WHAT IF

12/27/2023

Would it get fried?

Transcript

00:00 Ever had a freshly cooked steak

00:03 delivered straight from the International Space Station?

00:07 Let me tell you,

00:09 it's not going to be what you expect.

00:12 You must have so many questions right now.

00:15 Like, is it possible to fry a steak in space?

00:19 How long would it take to get that perfect crust?

00:23 And what side dish should you go with?

00:26 "Solid or mashed potatoes?"

00:30 This is WHAT IF,

00:32 and here's what would happen

00:33 if you dropped a steak from the International Space Station.

00:37 It's not every day that a chunk of meat falls from the sky.

00:43 Astronauts on the International Space Station

00:46 have precautions in place to keep anything from dropping down to Earth.

00:50 But at the same time,

00:52 they have to deal with spacesuit gloves that

00:54 only allow about 20% of their gloveless range of motion.

00:58 And sometimes, things do slip away.

01:04 Astronauts have dropped everything from a camera to a spatula.

01:09 They used that thing for space shuttle repairs,

01:11 and not for cooking, in case you're wondering.

01:14 So what if you got to go to the ISS,

01:18 and on your final spacewalk,

01:20 a perfect cut of rib-eye steak slipped through your hands,

01:24 completely by accident?

01:27 Alright, before we get to the part

01:29 where you're spacewalking with a piece of raw meat in your hands,

01:32 we need to figure out how to get that meat there in the first place.

01:37 The International Space Station has been continuously occupied

01:40 since the end of the year 2000.

01:43 But none of its visitors have been chefs.

01:46 Astronauts have all their food pre-cooked here on Earth.

01:50 Their meals either come ready to eat,

01:52 or can be easily prepared adding water or by heating.

01:57 Anything that hadn't been approved

01:59 six months before your launch would be prohibited.

02:02 You would break about 20 food regulations

02:05 by sneaking raw meat aboard the ISS,

02:08 let alone by dropping that meat from orbit.

02:12 There is a reason why dropping objects from the space station is a no-go,

02:16 and requires astronauts to report such incidents immediately.

02:20 But let me get back to that in a moment.

02:23 The ISS is orbiting 400 km (1,000 mi) above the Earth.

02:27 What do you say we start the experiment with some closer-to-Earth cooking?

02:32 As a side note,

02:33 I'll eliminate some of the orbital effects from the story,

02:36 for now.

02:38 Let's imagine that the steak you dropped

02:40 would head straight down to the ground.

02:42 What would make it cook?

02:45 When an item, like a steak,

02:47 is plummeting to Earth from space,

02:49 it moves really fast.

02:52 And because of that high speed,

02:54 the air in front of it can't get out of the way fast enough.

02:57 It gets compressed.

02:59 And when air is compressed,

03:01 its molecules move faster,

03:03 releasing kinetic energy.

03:06 Things get hotter.

03:08 But would it get hot enough to fry the steak?

03:11 Let's see.

03:13 If you dropped the steak from a height of 70 km (15 mi),

03:17 it would break the sound barrier.

03:19 For about a minute,

03:20 the air around it would heat up to 177 °C (320 °F).

03:24 If you've ever cooked a steak,

03:25 you know that this time and temperature

03:28 isn't quite enough to cook the meat all the way through.

03:32 When the steak hits the ground,

03:33 it would still be far from well done.

03:37 At 100 km (15 mi) up,

03:39 your ribeye would be falling at twice the speed of sound for 90 seconds.

03:44 That's enough to add a little cooked crispness to its surface.

03:48 Unfortunately, you'd still be eating raw steak,

03:51 thanks to the subzero temperatures of the Earth's stratosphere.

03:57 Dropping a steak down from 250 km (155 mi) above Earth

04:00 would get it that lovely seared surface.

04:04 The falling meat would travel at six times the speed of sound,

04:08 although it would still end up raw on the inside.

04:12 If the steak fell from even higher above the atmosphere,

04:16 its front shockwave would have temperatures reaching thousands of degrees.

04:20 The meat's surface layer would start to burn off,

04:23 looking more like flakes of carbon rather than a nice, medium-rare steak.

04:29 But even dropping the steak from the ISS

04:32 wouldn't give it enough time to cook through.

04:35 You'd be eating a burned lump of protein that's raw red in the center.

04:39 On Earth, it actually takes some degree of talent to cook a steak like that,

04:44 if you take away the burning part.

04:47 Space makes for a horrible barbecue,

04:49 unless you prefer your steak raw with an ashy aftertaste.

04:54 You'd also have to wait quite some time for a steak to reach your plate.

04:58 If the ISS itself were to fall from space,

05:01 it would take two and a half years due to the orbit it's in.

05:05 Exactly how long it would take a steak to freefall from a height of 400 km (1,000 mi)

05:10 is uncertain.

05:12 In reality, if we turned the orbital forces back on,

05:16 your steak wouldn't actually make it to Earth.

05:19 Your potential dinner would go into orbit first.

05:22 Then, roughly 90 minutes later,

05:25 it would be flying right back at the ISS at a speed of roughly 28,000 km/h (15,000 mph).

05:32 It might not hit the ISS, but if it did, you'd know it right away.

05:38 Red meat's bad enough for you on Earth,

05:40 but in space, it has the potential to wipe out an entire crew.

05:46 If you're still up for the experiment,

05:48 at least remember to sterilize the meat before you seal it in a pouch.

05:52 And don't take cabbage, beans, or broccoli for a side dish.

05:57 Those foods make astronauts fart,

05:59 and that's never a good thing in close quarters.

06:03 The only escape from that stinky situation would be taking a walk in outer space,

06:08 maybe with no space suit at all.

06:11 But that's a story for another WHAT IF.

06:15 [ music ]

06:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]

What If You Dropped a Steak From Orbit?

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