How long would you survive being strapped to the top of a launchnig rocket ship benig launched?

3.41 seconds

this is what makes LR great

I'd say 90 seconds

0/10

Probably depends upon how strong your lungs are from your weekly mileage.

depends on the rocket ship. The Challenger? Not more than about 73 seconds.

El G would last longer than I would, but after 60 secs, a rocket is going 1,000 mph. So I would say the wind and cold would eliminate your map after around 30 seconds.

I suppose there's a good chance you'd die within seconds of ignition due to the extreme sound and/or the exhaust plume.

Assuming you made it through that, you could run into a number of problems from exposure to high altitutde and velocity. Below are numbers for Apollo 11, from this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Yd-GxJ_QM

T (s) Alt (ft) Vel (mph)

0 0 0

10 413 56

20 1673 125

30 3970 212

40 7448 318

50 12697 452

60 19390 604

65 23294 698 ---> Mach 1.0

70 29029 846 ---> Everest altitude

80 38714 1101

90 50853 1443

Nobody has ever broke the sound barrier outside of a vehicle, probably wouldn't be pleasant (Although Joseph Kittinger hit mach 0.9 in the world's highest parachute jump in Project Excelsior, he was in a protective suit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excelsior

).

As for the altitude, an unacclimated person could last a few minutes at 8000m before passing out, but that is just standing still, not traveling faster than sound and experiencing 2+ g acceleration.

As far as cooling or heating goes, I think you'd be getting pretty cold with a 600mph wind chill at 20000 feet, but once you break the sound barrier the extreme airflow may start to heat you up. Nothing like the levels seen during reentry at Mach 20+ though, and I think you'd be dead from one of the other factors before experiencing this.

Tl;dr best case about a minute and a half, likely no more than 80 seconds, worst case only a few seconds.

Too extreme wrote:

As far as cooling or heating goes, I think you'd be getting pretty cold with a 600mph wind chill at 20000 feet, but once you break the sound barrier the extreme airflow may start to heat you up. Nothing like the levels seen during reentry at Mach 20+ though, and I think you'd be dead from one of the other factors before experiencing this.

I think we all agree that a gore-tex jacket would be necessary to cut down on the wind-chill.

just don't wear tights because those are for gays only...

This dude was a badass...

http://www.ejectionsite.com/stapp.htm

November and the beginning of December were spent preparing for what turned out to be John Stapp's 29th and as it turned out final sled ride. This time he would attempt to push the envelope all the way to the post office. The sled would travel into the transonic speed zone, mach .9. The heavy door mechanism would be removed, and Stapp would face the wind protected only by a helmet and visor. And when the sled stopped, and it would in a mere 1.4 seconds, Stapp would be subjected to more Gs than anyone had ever willingly endured. It made George Nichols extremely apprehensive just thinking about it. Stapp wasn't just out to prove that people could survive a high speed ejection, he was seemingly trying to find the actual limit of human survivability to G force. "To me there was no real justification for being killed from the deceleration," says Nichols. "I didn't want to see it. He was just too good a friend to see get hurt."

Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger, who had been participating in another ground- breaking set of Stapp experiments — flying zero G profiles to study the effects of weightlessness — remembers being asked to fly a photo chase plane for the run. "Stapp said, 'Captain we have a project coming up here in a couple weeks. It's a sled run and we're going to get up to 614 miles per hour'," remembers Kittinger. "But he didn't say it was a human sled run. And he did not tell me it was him." It wasn't until a day before the test that an astonished Kittinger finally learned the truth. "I was flabbergasted he was going to be going that fast," Kittinger says, "It was a point of departure — a new biological limit he was going to be establishing on that run." If he lived, it would be as significant a human achievement as breaking the four minute mile.

At X-minus ten on December 10, 1954, George Nichols helped fit a rubber bite block, equipped with an accelerometer, into John Stapp's mouth. Then with a final pat for good luck, he headed down to the far end of the track. As X-minus two approached, the last two Northrop crew members left the sled and hustled into a nearby blockhouse. Sitting alone atop the Sonic Wind, Stapp looked like a pathetic figure. A siren wailed eerily, adding to the tension, and two red flares lofted skywards. Overhead, pilot Joe Kittinger, approaching in a T-33, pushed his throttle wide open in anticipation of the launch. With five seconds to go Stapp yanked a lanyard activating the sled's movie cameras, and hunkered down for the inevitable shock. The Sonic Wind's nine rockets detonated with a terrific roar, spewing 35-foot long trails of fire and hurtling Stapp down the track. "He was going like a bullet," Kittinger remembers. "He went by me like I was standing still, and I was going 350 mph." Just seconds into the run the sled had reached its peak velocity of 632 miles per hour — actually faster than a bullet — subjecting Stapp to 20 Gs of force and battering him with wind pressures near two tons. "I thought," continues Kittinger, "that sled is going so damn fast the first bounce is going to be Albuquerque. I mean, there was no way on God's earth that sled could stop at the end of the track. No way." But then, just as the sound of the rockets' initial firing reached the ears of far off observers, the Wind hit the water brake. The rear of the sled, its rockets expended, tore away. The front section continued downrange for several hundred feet, hardly slowing at all until it hit the second water brake.

Then, a torrent of spray a hundred feet across exploded out the back of the Sonic Wind. It stopped like it had hit a concrete wall. To Kittinger, flying above and behind, it appeared absolutely devastating. "He stopped in a fraction of a second," Kittinger says, the shock of the moment echoing in his voice. "It was absolutely inconceivable that anybody could go that fast and then just stop, and survive."

Down below, George Nichols and the ground crew raced to the scene, followed by an ambulance. An agitated Nichols vaulted onto the sled, and much to his relief, saw that Stapp was alive. He even managed what looked like a smile, despite being in great pain. Once again, he'd beat the odds. He'd live to see another day.

But could he see? George Nichols wasn't sure, and what he vividly remembers from that day, fifty years later, were John Stapp's eyes. He had suffered a complete red out. "When I got up to the sled I saw his eyes... Just horrible," recalls Nichols, his voice cracking with emotion. "His eyes …were completely filled with blood." When the Sonic Wind had hit the water brake, it had produced 46.2 Gs of force. And for an astonishing 1.1 seconds, Stapp'd endured 25 Gs. It was the equivalent of a Mach 1.6 ejection at 40,000 feet, a jolt in excess of that experienced by a driver who crashes into a red brick wall at over 120 miles per hour. Only it had lasted perhaps nine times longer. And it had burst nearly every capillary in Stapp's eyeballs.

As George Nichols and some flight surgeons helped Stapp into a waiting stretcher, Stapp worried aloud that he'd pushed his luck too far. "This time," he remarked, "I get the white cane and the seeing eye dog." But when surgeons at the hospital examined him, they discovered that Stapp's retinas had not detached. And within minutes, he could make out some "blue specks" and a short time later he could discern one of the surgeons' fingers. By the next day, his vision had returned more or less to normal.

18 days, 4 hours and 13 minutes.