Ways To Die On Jupiter

Jupiter is visited in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic, Technic and Flying Mountains future histories and in his independent novel, Three Worlds To Conquer. (Three Worlds... has a marginal future historical element because its events occur after the "Sam Hall" revolution described in the short story of that name.)

The problem is always how to survive in the hostile Jovian environment. In "Brake," should a spaceship that needs to decelerate make braking ellipses in the Jovian atmosphere? Arguably not: in that thick and turbulent atmosphere, an already damaged ship would not have enough control to compute its exit orbit so there would be insufficient time to inform the rescue boats before the ship had reentered the atmosphere.

Crashing on the surface would be fatal because the atmosphere is hydrogen and helium at one hundred and forty degrees Absolute. But there would be no time to breathe because the ship would be "'...spattered on the surface...'" (Cold Victory, p. 272) But the ship would not even reach the surface because it would be squashed by Jupiter's tens of thousands of atmosphere's pressure.

The solution is to lighten the ship so that it can float in the lighter upper atmosphere until rescued. Because of Jupiter's massive gravity, the air thins out with height more slowly so there is a deeper layer of thin air for the braking ellipses. We realized that, didn't we?