Would it get fried?
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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 ]
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