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Why do people always do cannonballs into pools, lakes, and oceans, and never from windows and overpasses into the concrete?
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.
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.
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.
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
