Russian capsules have returned to land since their very first launches.
The decision has more to do with geopolitics than physics. Russia does not have a robust Navy with access to equatorial waters on which to land a spacecraft, the US does. Given the historical accuracy of landing a capsule it is actually a hell of a lot easier to drive a big ship to the eventual location than it is to drive a big truck into the middle of a desert. The reason western nations return capsules to the sea is because its easier to recover them there.
Both approaches have technical challenges. Returning to land requires a slower landing speed (although as a percentage of the starting velocity of a spacecraft its a pretty insignificant difference) and landing on the sea requires the carrying of flotation devices and designing a capsule with buoyancy in mind.
In other words this post is completely inaccurate.
It was a three-barreled gun that fired shotgun shells, rifle rounds, and rescue flares. 10 rounds of each type of ammunition were supplied. The stock could be detached and used as a machete.
For a while, these guns were on every Soyuz capsule that docked with ISS, and they were under the operational control of the Soyuz commander. I've read that they may have been retired in 2007 because Russia finally ran out of the very unique ammo.
It's true. They also issue a pistol as part of the kit and as far I know still so, but it is apparently optional and most cosmonauts choose to leave it behind.
"Look out Comrade! Is wolf, attempting to undermine Glorious People's Space Mission with revisionist propaganda of deed. Death to Wolf. Death to Trotsky. Long live Great Socialist Republic."
The Russian system has a braking rocket that fires at the very last second to soften up the landing. On one early Soyuz mission, this rocket didn't fire, and the solo cosmonaut suffered substantial injuries from the landing.
The Orion capsule hits the water at the final parachute speed of 20-30 mph without injuring the crew. But as you state, they also have to design the capsule for flotation and egress in potentially rough sea state.
Boeing Starliner is designed for a land landing, but it uses deployable air bags instead of a braking rocket. It's not clear that Starliner will ever fly again after the RCS thruster problems.
It's such a weird flip of philosophy given we've all heard the classic story of the US spending millions on developing pens that write in space while the Soviet Union just issued pencils.
Choosing a retroburst system over trusty parachutes over water is wack, but as someone else pointed out it's more to do with their Navy than anything else. Plus knowing Russia's current capabilities, they'd probably forget to factor in the water being frozen or something stupid like that.
I listened to Chris Hadfield describe coming home in a Soyuz capsul and it rolling a few times after hitting the ground. Land works but water sounds more comfortable, as long as you don't get sea sick on top of it all.
When they were covering the Artemis landing, they mentioned that just returning to earth from weightlessness makes them pretty nauseous, so they get motion sickness meds before landing anyway. Ibuprofen or anti inflammatory meds too, since 1 G is hard on joints after a few days without it.
Water isn't like in the video games. It's still a hard landing that you wouldn't survive if you were going too fast. There's just much more margin for error trying to hit the ocean vs. a plot of land.
Former Navy rescue swimmer here. Judging height over open ocean is really hard. Especially in rolling seas. Deploy too high and too fast and you fucking skip off the water.
On July 21, 1961, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom flew the second NASA Mercury-Redstone mission. But that trip, nearly identical to Shepard’s almost ended in disaster. Grissom’s capsule, Liberty Bell 7, sank after the successful splashdown in the Atlantic, and Grissom came close to drowning.
The space race has a lot of "learning by doing" with some pretty icky lessons learned along the way.
Both approaches have technical challenges. Returning to land requires a slower landing speed (although as a percentage of the starting velocity of a spacecraft its a pretty insignificant difference) and landing on the sea requires the carrying of flotation devices and designing a capsule with buoyancy in mind.
Does landing on the sea really require that much more braking when compared to land? Sure water has some give but I've always understood that, from a large enough hight, due to surface tension landing on water is the same as landing on concrete. But I ain't no physicist and by no means of the imagination a rocket scientist so I might as well be very wrong here lmao
One of the advantages of water is even if your target area is measured in square miles it's all roughly at sea level. If you miss your target area on land you have to account for that and trees and wildlife and hopefully not buildings.
Like the above said, you can do either, it's kind of a wash. But a water based landing does simplify some things.
They later said it was less than 1 mile away from the target spot.
A big benefit of the ocean is if the capsule loses all attitude control, it can still reenter and survive. But it will be a "ballistic reentry", much more punishing with the g forces, and also about 1500 miles short of the target zone.
The Pacific Ocean makes it easy to ensure that those backup contingency landing sites are also safe landing sites.
I mean they generally do aim for a specific spot so the ships can be nearby to pick it up, so even aiming for the ocean a perfect bullseye is a valid thing to say lol
She probably assumes the landing location is entirely random, which is ridiculous to anyone who has even the slightest understanding of the amount of planning needed for space travel, but those people and the people who believe space travel is fake are not the same people.
They say Arthemis landed on EARTH, but it actually landed on WATER (no earth far and wide). If they lie about something so obvious, what else are they lying about??
It's just that some (bad) people think that being woke is a bad thing, and they are overrepresented in the culture at the moment.
To be fair, some (not necessarily bad) people also use woke to mean 'comes from a good place, but gets taken too far and is a bit cringe', similar to 'hippy-dippy' or 'touchy- feely' in the past, I don't hold that against them too much.
This mission especially brought the "space travel is fake" crowd out. The rocket launch explodes over a deserted area, nobody's onboard, all the missions are faked, and the splashdowns are in restricted waters to sell the simulation.
Usually this is on top of "well you can't survive the Van Allen radiation belts", as if radiation safety and shielding is not a problem we understood and solved before we even lit off Mercury.
Ultimate reasoning for it is either a vague notion of "control", bread and circuses, or "they do this to defy God", because space isn't real and the Firmament lies above the sky.
Also some flat earthers believe Antartica is an icy wall that surrounds Earth and the authorities claim the Earth is a sphere so that people don't try to find out what's behind that wall, for reasons known only to said authorities.
Flat earth-ism started as very elaborate satirical performance art. Now thanks to 50 years of Republicans cheapening public education, a plurality of Americans actually believe this shit and want it taught in the schools.
I have had the displeasure of knowing several people like this. In the post-truth landscape we find ourselves, there are really people out there who will call your denial of their alternative facts "unscientific" because they think that science is just about questioning everything, and they know their perspective is the right one.
Therefore, when their high school science teacher (who obviously hated them in particular for their good Christian beliefs) insists on ideas like the Earth being round, or the existence of climate change or—heavens forbid—evolution, she's obviously just trying to brainwash her students to believe her liberal agenda.
Just launch these fuckers into space. I’m fine with not shooting trash at the sun because it’s too expensive but we should let make an exception for people like this. If they’re so smart I’m sure they’ll figure out a way back.
But the landing needs active thrusters to soften the blow. This introduces more complexity and also adds more danger as there needs to be extra fuel on board.
Correct. It’s not that they can’t, they save tens of millions by landing in the water on fuel alone. Not only to land but to leave. The extra fuel increases the weight which increases the overall fuel cost on launch.
I figured village was making a kerbel joke. Everyone who's played knows that design that happens early on when you are struggling to get out of earths gravity into orbit and all the studden you just have umpteen boosters and struts precariously attaching everything so they don't go flying off. I think they made it now so you cant even get RCS that early in the campaign type mode.
Yes, because the area gets a no-fly zone and navy ships go to get the capsule, it makes it "easy" to fake because the government controls the situation. Yes, this ignores a lot of other independently verifiable data, because that doesn't confirm biases. Yes, it ignores all the Soyuz landings over land. Yes, it ignores the facts that the Soviets and Russians do and did the same thing, as if a highly-planned re-entry might just happen in anyone's rye field. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's on purpose.
Why would that be any different over land? Wouldn't they land in government-controlled land? The conspiracy isn't unique to water... or am I missing something?
The purpose of these questions people ask conspiratorially is not to get answers. It's to foment doubt. They don't want answers; if they did they could look it up and find an answer. They just want people to start questioning the official story, then they sell their own conspiracy to them. It's an old playbook, and people like Alex Jones have been using it for decades.
why have we not been arming nasa astronauts against these devious space bears or did they only learn about creamy delicious cosmonaut from soyuz capsules?
This was because they had rockets that fired precipitously close to the ground which cushioned the landing to something like 20 mph IIRC. If those rockets failed for any reason there would be a very big splat.
At an altitude of eight meters, the "Posadka" (landing) signal lights up on the cosmonauts' console and at an altitude between 1.1 and 0.8 meters from Earth, the Kaktus altimeter issues a command for the firing of the braking solid motors, DMP. The spectacular firing takes place around 0.7 meters above the surface, reducing the descent speed of the capsule to between 0 and 3 meters per second. A speed of 2 or 1.5 meters per second is considered average at the touchdown point. The structural loads on the capsule at the moment of DMP firing was quoted as 0.1 kilograms. These loads were reported to be the main reason for ruling out the reuse of the Descent Module.
In case of landing under a spare parachute, the descent speed could reach as high as 9.5 or even 10.5 meters per second, but it is still considered to be survivable by the crew.
Some additional cushioning at touchdown is provided by individual crew seats, known as Kazbek (Kazbek-UM on Soyuz TMA) equipped with custom-fitted liners for each crew member. As a last resort, the bottom of the capsule also designed to absorb the shock of a particularly bad impact.
https://russianspaceweb.com/soyuz-landing.html
He went up there knowing he was likely going to die because of the build problems with the early Soyuz capsules.
The module crashed into the ground at terminal velocity, killing Komarov, at 6.24 a.m.
...
Soyuz 1 engineers reported 203 design faults to party leaders, but their concerns "were overruled by political pressures for a series of space feats to mark the anniversary of Lenin's birthday".
You are talking about surface tension. The importance parameter is speed not height and "like concrete" is a drastic simplification as both behave very differently on impact.
Notably whereas high divers have reached speeds of 60 mph the Artemis II splashed down at around 1/4 that speed a speed you too can obtain by jumping from about 10 feet up.
Odd thing is there are landers that have come down in land, Soyuz in particular comes to mind and there might even be some US have some examples in the past also.
Starliner has landed at White Sands, New Mexico for its first three flights, and, while not orbital-class, New Shepard’s capsules also come down on land in west Texas.
Yeah. I saw the first explosion live in the 80s. All the classrooms had their TV AV units rolled in to watch the launch of first women in space or something to that effect. And OHHH that looks bad
Ok but like hear me out ok alright so like they LAUNCH from LAND like EVERY time never water alright ok so like how come they never LAND ON THE L A N D right ya feel me rips bong it's like the water isn't like you know like the land right snores
Speed, boats need to be outside the area where they might get hit, which is actually quite large.
Boats, even fast ones, are quite slow. And the larger boats that the fast ones would be deployed from are even slower. So even though that risk area gets smaller as the capsule descends, the big boats are waaaayy slower and still stuck far away. Generally, too far for 'fast' boats to get there quickly enough.
Helicopters are much faster, also relative to the size to be able to have medical staff on hand. So they can get there fast enough.
There is significant possibility of injury, and often times there are communication blackouts when they would already need to be leaving to make it in time. So, you send the fast thing.
Russian capsules have returned to land since their very first launches.
The decision has more to do with geopolitics than physics. Russia does not have a robust Navy with access to equatorial waters on which to land a spacecraft, the US does. Given the historical accuracy of landing a capsule it is actually a hell of a lot easier to drive a big ship to the eventual location than it is to drive a big truck into the middle of a desert. The reason western nations return capsules to the sea is because its easier to recover them there.
Both approaches have technical challenges. Returning to land requires a slower landing speed (although as a percentage of the starting velocity of a spacecraft its a pretty insignificant difference) and landing on the sea requires the carrying of flotation devices and designing a capsule with buoyancy in mind.
In other words this post is completely inaccurate.
For a while (maybe still) Russian rockets even had a shotgun on board after wolves got to a landing first.
It was a three-barreled gun that fired shotgun shells, rifle rounds, and rescue flares. 10 rounds of each type of ammunition were supplied. The stock could be detached and used as a machete.
For a while, these guns were on every Soyuz capsule that docked with ISS, and they were under the operational control of the Soyuz commander. I've read that they may have been retired in 2007 because Russia finally ran out of the very unique ammo.
That sounds way too cool to be true but I'll take your word for it and do some research lol
It's true. They also issue a pistol as part of the kit and as far I know still so, but it is apparently optional and most cosmonauts choose to leave it behind.
Space gun control is a thing: https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-i-stop-cosmonauts-carrying-guns
Did the cosmonauts fend off the wolves, or did they just stick the wolves in their suits and pretend that they were on the mission the whole time?
"Look out Comrade! Is wolf, attempting to undermine Glorious People's Space Mission with revisionist propaganda of deed. Death to Wolf. Death to Trotsky. Long live Great Socialist Republic."
The Russian system has a braking rocket that fires at the very last second to soften up the landing. On one early Soyuz mission, this rocket didn't fire, and the solo cosmonaut suffered substantial injuries from the landing.
The Orion capsule hits the water at the final parachute speed of 20-30 mph without injuring the crew. But as you state, they also have to design the capsule for flotation and egress in potentially rough sea state.
Boeing Starliner is designed for a land landing, but it uses deployable air bags instead of a braking rocket. It's not clear that Starliner will ever fly again after the RCS thruster problems.
It's such a weird flip of philosophy given we've all heard the classic story of the US spending millions on developing pens that write in space while the Soviet Union just issued pencils.
Choosing a retroburst system over trusty parachutes over water is wack, but as someone else pointed out it's more to do with their Navy than anything else. Plus knowing Russia's current capabilities, they'd probably forget to factor in the water being frozen or something stupid like that.
You used "story", so I'll assume you know this is mostly untrue, but for any of the lucky 10k that hasn't heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and_Soviet_space_programs
That story is apocryphal.
Pencils aren't suitable in space because the last thing you want are little wood and graphite shavings floating around the capsule.
Both the US and Russia used grease pens.
The Fischer space pen was developed by a private company with no public investment and was marketed to the government and public.
Not so much Navy as geography and allies' geography.
I'm upset that you didn't mention Cosmonauts are equiped with an on board shotgun to fend off bears.
Moon bears?
Desmond the Moon Bear
EVERYBODY DO THE FLOP flops
Low key, we gotta pack some shotties in ours. Space race to the death!
I listened to Chris Hadfield describe coming home in a Soyuz capsul and it rolling a few times after hitting the ground. Land works but water sounds more comfortable, as long as you don't get sea sick on top of it all.
When they were covering the Artemis landing, they mentioned that just returning to earth from weightlessness makes them pretty nauseous, so they get motion sickness meds before landing anyway. Ibuprofen or anti inflammatory meds too, since 1 G is hard on joints after a few days without it.
Water isn't like in the video games. It's still a hard landing that you wouldn't survive if you were going too fast. There's just much more margin for error trying to hit the ocean vs. a plot of land.
My father was a fighter pilot. He explained that at a sufficiently sharp angle, hitting water was like hitting concrete.
Surface tension is a weird thing chemically/electrostatically, but we also probably don't have life on Earth without it.
Former Navy rescue swimmer here. Judging height over open ocean is really hard. Especially in rolling seas. Deploy too high and too fast and you fucking skip off the water.
They have parachutes for a softer landing on water. They aren't hitting it at terminal velocity from the free fall
Imagine surviving a whole ass moon flight just to perish at sea because no one comes to get you..
They had only imagined the moon flight...
The space race has a lot of "learning by doing" with some pretty icky lessons learned along the way.
Ref
Does landing on the sea really require that much more braking when compared to land? Sure water has some give but I've always understood that, from a large enough hight, due to surface tension landing on water is the same as landing on concrete. But I ain't no physicist and by no means of the imagination a rocket scientist so I might as well be very wrong here lmao
One of the advantages of water is even if your target area is measured in square miles it's all roughly at sea level. If you miss your target area on land you have to account for that and trees and wildlife and hopefully not buildings.
Like the above said, you can do either, it's kind of a wash. But a water based landing does simplify some things.
yes the post may be inaccurate but i doubt the dumbass they were responding to could have even read HALF of your comment
another thing that's also not considered here is the fact that astronauts parachute out of the capsule before impact
... What?
Like elevators, if they jump right before impact it doesn’t hurt.
False. They teleport.
No no no..... They don't even have waffle houses in Russia or the ocean.
Nonsense.
They have ejection seats.
No no no. They dive, so as to hit the water with the least surface area.
Water big. Easy hit.
The nasa broadcaster called it a perfect bullseye landing about 5 times. A perfect bullseye, hit em right in the Pacific ocean.
They later said it was less than 1 mile away from the target spot.
A big benefit of the ocean is if the capsule loses all attitude control, it can still reenter and survive. But it will be a "ballistic reentry", much more punishing with the g forces, and also about 1500 miles short of the target zone.
The Pacific Ocean makes it easy to ensure that those backup contingency landing sites are also safe landing sites.
I mean they generally do aim for a specific spot so the ships can be nearby to pick it up, so even aiming for the ocean a perfect bullseye is a valid thing to say lol
Bullseye
Bonus: You pee into the water and the fish have to just be there. Because fuck fish.
What the fuck is the first person insinuating? What would always landing in the water "prove"??
I think she's saying 'pay attention' because she is used to people drifting off mid-sentence
You can't easily go out to see a splashdown in the middle of the ocean, therefore space travel is fake.
Except for all the private boats parked right outside of the restricted area watching with binoculars.
If they are landing on land it would have to be in like a middle of desert/plains anyways and it's not exactly trivial to go watch in person either
The types of people who say this stuff are solipsists if that helps. THEY can’t personally go see it land so from their perspective it’s fake
A combination of that and way too much YouTube fox news type conditioning
She probably assumes the landing location is entirely random, which is ridiculous to anyone who has even the slightest understanding of the amount of planning needed for space travel, but those people and the people who believe space travel is fake are not the same people.
They say Arthemis landed on EARTH, but it actually landed on WATER (no earth far and wide). If they lie about something so obvious, what else are they lying about??
Why do people always do cannonballs into pools, lakes, and oceans, and never from windows and overpasses into the concrete?
I mean, people do that occasionally, but for completely different reasons.
You made me burst out laughing.
I though "woke" was the term that implied people being asleep, or are they use them interchangeably now?
Woke means you're awake to the injustices in society
Yup. Being woke means you care about other people. Which the right undeniably hates.
wasn't woke used as a slang for denoting good things in the past?
It started in afro communities and "woke" meant they were socially conscious and aware of racial injustice and systemic oppression
We should be using this meaning of it
We are.
It's just that some (bad) people think that being woke is a bad thing, and they are overrepresented in the culture at the moment.
To be fair, some (not necessarily bad) people also use woke to mean 'comes from a good place, but gets taken too far and is a bit cringe', similar to 'hippy-dippy' or 'touchy- feely' in the past, I don't hold that against them too much.
What… are they even trying to imply?
The ocean is flat
This mission especially brought the "space travel is fake" crowd out. The rocket launch explodes over a deserted area, nobody's onboard, all the missions are faked, and the splashdowns are in restricted waters to sell the simulation.
Usually this is on top of "well you can't survive the Van Allen radiation belts", as if radiation safety and shielding is not a problem we understood and solved before we even lit off Mercury.
Ultimate reasoning for it is either a vague notion of "control", bread and circuses, or "they do this to defy God", because space isn't real and the Firmament lies above the sky.
Also some flat earthers believe Antartica is an icy wall that surrounds Earth and the authorities claim the Earth is a sphere so that people don't try to find out what's behind that wall, for reasons known only to said authorities.
Flat earth-ism started as very elaborate satirical performance art. Now thanks to 50 years of Republicans cheapening public education, a plurality of Americans actually believe this shit and want it taught in the schools.
I have had the displeasure of knowing several people like this. In the post-truth landscape we find ourselves, there are really people out there who will call your denial of their alternative facts "unscientific" because they think that science is just about questioning everything, and they know their perspective is the right one.
Therefore, when their high school science teacher (who obviously hated them in particular for their good Christian beliefs) insists on ideas like the Earth being round, or the existence of climate change or—heavens forbid—evolution, she's obviously just trying to brainwash her students to believe her liberal agenda.
It's not just Americanas. Many prominent flat Earthers come out of England.
Just launch these fuckers into space. I’m fine with not shooting trash at the sun because it’s too expensive but we should let make an exception for people like this. If they’re so smart I’m sure they’ll figure out a way back.
Seems a bit harsh, and I agree!
Several capsules are designed to effectively and safely land on land.
Including the soyuz which to this day routinely lands on land
But the landing needs active thrusters to soften the blow. This introduces more complexity and also adds more danger as there needs to be extra fuel on board.
And extra weight I imagine, making it more expensive to launch.
Correct. It’s not that they can’t, they save tens of millions by landing in the water on fuel alone. Not only to land but to leave. The extra fuel increases the weight which increases the overall fuel cost on launch.
Just add more boosters. Problem solved.
You might need to add more struts too.
it's not quite that simple.
you also have to make sure mechjeb is installed and nasa has "too much pride"
I figured village was making a kerbel joke. Everyone who's played knows that design that happens early on when you are struggling to get out of earths gravity into orbit and all the studden you just have umpteen boosters and struts precariously attaching everything so they don't go flying off. I think they made it now so you cant even get RCS that early in the campaign type mode.
Might as well send 2 rockets. One to leave and one to come back.
And the space shuttle which did it for decades
she's got a good point, should we called waterers not landers
....ok, but what is the post getting at?
Like what conspiracy is this supporting?
That they are more easily faked on water?
Yes, because the area gets a no-fly zone and navy ships go to get the capsule, it makes it "easy" to fake because the government controls the situation. Yes, this ignores a lot of other independently verifiable data, because that doesn't confirm biases. Yes, it ignores all the Soyuz landings over land. Yes, it ignores the facts that the Soviets and Russians do and did the same thing, as if a highly-planned re-entry might just happen in anyone's rye field. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's on purpose.
Why would that be any different over land? Wouldn't they land in government-controlled land? The conspiracy isn't unique to water... or am I missing something?
You have dozens more IQ points than needed to understand this
Thank you for the smile this comment brought to my face
What HeroicBillyBishop said :)
The purpose of these questions people ask conspiratorially is not to get answers. It's to foment doubt. They don't want answers; if they did they could look it up and find an answer. They just want people to start questioning the official story, then they sell their own conspiracy to them. It's an old playbook, and people like Alex Jones have been using it for decades.
The only thing you're missing is brain damage.
It makes no sense and is predicated on not caring about actual real information.
gagarin just parachuted out of a plane and told that farmer he went to space
They never land back on land? Really? Tell that to Russia, they always land the Soyuz back on land.
To be fair the Soviet cosmonauts did land in the Kazakh steppe. I mean sure the landings were probably hard but they didn't die.
They did have to give them a special gun so they weren't killed by bears though.
space bears?
Bears that realize once you crack that Soyuz shell there's a creamy cosmonaut middle.
Crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside. And still hot, probably.
why have we not been arming nasa astronauts against these devious space bears or did they only learn about creamy delicious cosmonaut from soyuz capsules?
This was because they had rockets that fired precipitously close to the ground which cushioned the landing to something like 20 mph IIRC. If those rockets failed for any reason there would be a very big splat.
In Russia, people have always been expendable.
That reminds me about Vladimir_Komarov on Soyuz_1.
He went up there knowing he was likely going to die because of the build problems with the early Soyuz capsules.
This is why I 100% believe in the “lost cosmonaut” theories.
Even stuff like probes for Venus they kept absolutely secret if they failed - and those didn’t kill people!
Well, the Russians had a sea, but they emptied it. So land it is.
Except for every time they used the Space Shuttle lol
Space shuttle says hold my beer I got this
Water is as hard as concrete from a large height.
They splash down in water because there is less chance of hitting something.
Due to its low density and viscosity, water cushions the spacecraft enough that there is no need for a braking rocket to slow the final descent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashdown
They have parachutes to slow decent, so its not just a hard drop from space to ocean surfacw
You are talking about surface tension. The importance parameter is speed not height and "like concrete" is a drastic simplification as both behave very differently on impact.
Notably whereas high divers have reached speeds of 60 mph the Artemis II splashed down at around 1/4 that speed a speed you too can obtain by jumping from about 10 feet up.
Just show this dumbass how landings happen for Russians on land. There’s a reason why no one does it multiple times.
Water = inside bones
Land = outside bones
Why does EVERY rocket have thrusters... PAY ATTENTION...
How do garbage twitter screenshots get so many upvotes
In light mode, too!
boing boing
I would add a spring emoji but the UNICODE Consortium has not deemed it important enough to include one in the character set.
Make it happen
Rabbit or kangaroo?
Actually, they need to check in with the wizard mermaids in Atlantis that made the whole thing possible.
So does a low iq mean if you notice something, anything, you think it is clever, like a little child?
Children can have high IQ
Odd thing is there are landers that have come down in land, Soyuz in particular comes to mind and there might even be some US have some examples in the past also.
Starliner has landed at White Sands, New Mexico for its first three flights, and, while not orbital-class, New Shepard’s capsules also come down on land in west Texas.
This doesn’t add up.
If I jump off a sufficiently high bridge into water I get crushed? What’s the velocity of the capsule?
You aren’t engineered to survive splashdown, the capsule is.
Don't act like you know them. That person might be engineered to survive splashdown.
Capsule makes contact with the water at around 20mph.
That’s definitely enough to render a 1996 Toyota Corolla inoperable.
Uhuh, tell that to the cosmanauts.
Can confirm, I get way more booms on land than in water in Kerbal Space Program
Now I am wondering if I can get crazy mods that allow me to make spaceships made of rubber so they don't crush or boom, they just bounce... 🤔
There are plenty of wild lander mods, I specifically recall one with balloons that was inspired by a mars rover (or a proposed one?).
The shuttles landed on runways…
Except when it exploded
The shuttles usually landed on runways…
Yeah. I saw the first explosion live in the 80s. All the classrooms had their TV AV units rolled in to watch the launch of first women in space or something to that effect. And OHHH that looks bad
Whenever I play KSP I always try a splash down in the ocean vs a crash down when I come back to Kerbin.
You don't want to risk it after a long journey somewhere and back. Just splash down in the water.
I like how conspiracy theories are now slightly sarcastic, signifying the underlying bullshit underneath.
The irony of telling everyone to pay attention.
Ok but like hear me out ok alright so like they LAUNCH from LAND like EVERY time never water alright ok so like how come they never LAND ON THE L A N D right ya feel me rips bong it's like the water isn't like you know like the land right snores
I spent so much time playing Kerbal Space Program in the early days that my asshole still puckers when I see a return vehicle heading toward the water
Boing boing
We also um... the shuttles?
But SLS uses Space Shuttle engines and that landed in a runway.
What I found funny is them getting plucked out by helicopter, why didn’t they drive a boat out there?
Speed, boats need to be outside the area where they might get hit, which is actually quite large.
Boats, even fast ones, are quite slow. And the larger boats that the fast ones would be deployed from are even slower. So even though that risk area gets smaller as the capsule descends, the big boats are waaaayy slower and still stuck far away. Generally, too far for 'fast' boats to get there quickly enough.
Helicopters are much faster, also relative to the size to be able to have medical staff on hand. So they can get there fast enough.
There is significant possibility of injury, and often times there are communication blackouts when they would already need to be leaving to make it in time. So, you send the fast thing.
How about Michael Phelps, he's smaller than a boat and he's quite fast. Why don't they send him?
Can he carry multiple medics and emergency medical equipment on his back and keep it all dry?
Yes
He won gold at the olympics multiple times, swimming with extra stuff is probably easy for him.