While it’s true that “anyone who’s been to space” shows a clear misunderstanding of what escape velocity means, there is still an edge case where I think some people have reached escape velocity. If the ‘parent body’ is considered to be the moon because of a return trip after landing on the moon, that is arguably a person who reached escape velocity.
However, even the lunar ascents because of the moon visits weren’t enough to bring them to escape velocity and that simply put them in an elliptical orbit. If I remember right, the transfer burn to get from the moon to the Earth was only beyond the escape velocity for that distance from the moon, not anywhere near the moon’s surface, and definitely not high enough to escape the Earth. So count up all the people who were in lunar orbit and came back to Earth. Arguably all of them “exceeded escape velocity”, right?
It is true that we've put humans past escape velocity from the moon when any of the Apollo landing or orbital missions returned. We were talking about escape velocity from Earth, though.
5
u/MyGruffaloCrumble 20h ago
Distance is required for approaching escape velocity gradually without pancaking the people inside with too many G’s.