New answers tagged landing
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My understanding is that returning to the launch site (well a different pad in the same complex) reduces logistics costs but also reduces payload capacity compared to landing on a droneship at sea.
It seems to me that ground pad landings are mostly used for.
Nasa CRS missions (my understanding is that cargo dragon is generally volume limited rather than ...
3
The probability of hitting a ship in the ocean is very small. Ships are tiny compared to an ocean.
I assumed a landing zone (blue circle) of 10 km diameter. The black circle is a security zone of 20 km diameter.
There are nine ships hidden in the forbidden landing zone. The ships are drawn as a filled circle of 50 m diameter. Do you see those tiny (8 green ...
4
No, not always. They had one RTLS in 2020 (vs. 8 successful drone ship landings).
In '19, they had 6 successful RTLS (vs. 9 drone ship landings), and in '18 they had 4 RTLS (vs. 8 drone ship landings).
I do not think you can draw any conclusions from that, yet. '19 saw the most RTLS launches, with a sharp decline in '20. Drawing any long-term conclusions ...
3
Falcon 9's have landed on two different ASDS drone ships (Just Read The Instructions in its two iterations, and Of Course I Still Love You) as well as LZ-1 in Florida, (on both pads at once, for Falcon Heavy) and at SLC-4 in California.
The mix changes every launch, but mostly the landings are at sea since it allows heavier payloads and still recover. Check ...
3
I believe all capsules are rated for an emergency land landing, in case there is an issue near launch. If the winds were particularly unfavorable, it could result in a landing between the pad and the ocean, which would be bad. I know for a fact that Apollo was rated to allow such landings, and I believe Crew Dragon is as well.
Note that it is for something ...
3
I'm late, but nevertheless.
I am sure the seats are custom-made mostly for land contact, not atmospheric reentry. The accelerations are far beyond 10 g in that moment, although brief. Some astronauts compared Soyuz land contact with a "car crash".
Solid-fuel rockets soften this at last moment, but not so much. Also in early Soyuz flights there were ...
9
The first of your several questions is about controlled reentry of devices designed for reentry. You then ask about devices not designed for reentry, which I address (partially).
Undesigned reentry can be rather imprecise. Taco Bell made a sizeable bet on this imprecision. The Progress M1-5 deorbit of Mir had relatively large location uncertainty. (This ...
12
Partial answer:
According to russianspaceweb.com, there are a set of large, pre-selected landing sites for the Soyuz capsules.
Soyuz can land with an accuracy of only 28 kilometers, (with a probability of 0.9997), in the automated aerodynamic descent mode, AUS, relative to the center of the projected landing area.
The main reason for such a low precision is ...
21
Partial Answer:
From Apollo by the Numbers we can see that even in the 1960s and 1970s the splashdown point was quite predictable.
Page 305 shows the maximum miss distance to the target point was 3 nautical miles. The maximum distance to the recovery ship was 13 nautical miles.
Note that the Apollo capsule was actively flown during entry by rolling the lift ...
6
We'll ignore the 18 hours spent in orbit between Endeavour's undocking and the actual beginning of descent; I don't know what the crew were doing during that period, but it wasn't really part of the return-to-Earth process.
I'm basing this answer on the times given Demo-2 return timeline posted on the NASA ISS blog on August 2, 2020, which as of this writing ...
-2
UPDATE: It doesn't always fail on every landing!
For example here's the SpaceX video from the ANASIS-II Mission.
Pardon the ugly GIF, I don't know how to make a better one...
video cued at 23:19 or T+ 08:22
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UPDATE: It doesn't get disrupted completely on every landing!
For example here's the SpaceX video from the ANASIS-II Mission.
Pardon the ugly GIF, I don't know how to make a better one...
video cued at 23:19 or T+ 08:22
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