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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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Why do people always do cannonballs into pools, lakes, and oceans, and never from windows and overpasses into the concrete?
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?
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.
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
The shuttles landed on runways…
Except when it exploded
The shuttles usually landed on runways…
Water is as hard as concrete from a large height.
They splash down in water because there is less chance of hitting something.
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.
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?
He won gold at the olympics multiple times, swimming with extra stuff is probably easy for him.
Yes
Several capsules are designed to effectively and safely land on land.
Including the soyuz which to this day routinely lands on land
And the space shuttle which did it for decades
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.
