I’m not really sure that’s the main reason. In case of a chute failure you’re going to have a bad time in either case.
Russian capsules land on land.
I think it’s just a lot more easier to recover, when there’s no landscape around that you need to traverse
Russian capsules launch from the Kazack steppe. In the event of a launch abort, like there was in October 2018, you need to have a capsule that can land on land.
American capsules launch from Florida and fly over the ocean. In the event of an abort, they need to be able to land at sea.
They both took their abort modes and just made it the standard way to land after a mission.
Sounds like the real reason right here. The sea landing surely is a lot easier and quicker to recover as well.
It’s also much easier to hit what you aim for
water -> water
Land -> oops, that’s a tree, and that’s a boulder, and that’s a lake.
Although recovering the people is much easier on land, most of the time you can land a helicopter near the capsule, recovering the hardware is generally more difficultAlso where they are taking off and landing in Russia is a big flat wasteland. It’s the ocean of the land. There isn’t a lot of empty space in the US unless you are either in the desert or in the places we grow corn and wheat. Less shit to crash into when it’s water in the US.
Makes perfect sense.
Also, water is bouncy and land is hard. There’s no way it’s not easier on the crew and capsule.
There are so many things that you can land on land that will absolutely ruin your day. A large boulder, a large tree, a cliffside, a building, something flammable, near an angry hungry bear… Astronauts coming back to Earth after spending a significant amount of time in microgravity are also mostly helpless until they adapt to Earth’s gravity again. The open sea is seen as safer in the American school of thought.
I imagine a lot of factors… but yeah that’s a big one, no mountains, no buildings, no population centers, you can miss by 100 miles and just add some time to the recovery.
The capsules can do a water splashdown with parachutes alone.
The capsules that land on land all seem to have some additional system to slow down in addition to the parachute. Boeing Starliner has airbags that deploy around and below the heat shield. Soyuz has a braking rocket system that fires immediately before impact.
So, the issue does come down to the chutes. A chute capable of reducing decent speed to 10m/s is significantly larger than one capable of getting the speed to 60 m/s. Impractically large on a weight constrained thing like a space capsule.
The Soyuz uses a small set of retro rockets to reduce speed in the last few seconds before touch down, and even then it’s like being in a car crash.
On the Vostok capsules the astronauts didn’t even land with the capsules, they just bailed out and parachuted down.
Landing in the ocean is significantly more comfortable and less complicated.
Your comment sounds good at first, it’s just that they splash down in water at 7.5m/s.
The nasa blog on the final day said. “At 5,400 feet, Orion’s drogue parachutes were cut and the three main parachutes deployed, reducing velocity to less than 200 feet per second and guiding Orion on its final descent and splashdown.”
Which is to say “less than” roughly 60 meters per second. Somewhere else on the site I couldn’t find again they mentioned it being a touch down speed of 20 miles per hour, which is a fair bit slower at about 9 meters a second, but that’s still a car crash if you’re hitting a solid surface.
The point remains. Getting a large object like that down to a soft, non injurious, speed is not practical with just a parachute. Other techniques must be employed.
Starliner also lands on land, and I believe Dragon has that option or at least was gong to at some point in its design.
Pay attention to what? Why would you say that and then proceed to say nothing?
Because it allows conspiracy theorists maximum flexibility to wrap whatever pseudoscience into whatever objections they get as replies.
It’s ‘think for your self’. Its a command, an open ended command.
Which they say with authority, because they fashion themselves as thought leaders (cough cult leaders cough) and have literally delusional levels of self confidence and ego.
Also
We did land on land
For like forty years we did that exclusively
It’s called the Space Shuttle and it’s pretty cool
Ignoring that the Soyuz is a more traditional capsule that does land on land, with timed rockets to slow their descent just before impact.
Let’s just say landing on water is better, based on the medical injuries different astronauts have suffered riding home on the Soyuz. Several American astronauts have experienced bruising and joint/back pain from the hard “bone-jarring” landing.
That’s true. Honestly I remember being a kid, learning about the Soyuz recovery system and being shocked. A 20mph collision with the ground (without the braking SRs, 5mph with them) doesn’t sound like much, but it can still ring your bell pretty good.
True.
While the USSR has a history of ignoring human safety, I suspect a large factor for landing on, well, land is the fact they had very few ports open year-round, unlike the US
Another commenter said that capsules are primarily designed for their abort landings. The US launches crewed missions from Florida, so the abort landing options are mostly in the Atlantic (on water landing). Russia launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, so their abort landing options are mostly over Northern Asia (on land landing)
Yeah, I saw that comment after writing this one and I agree that that’s moreblikely then mine. That being said, I think my previous comment is at least a tertiary benefit, so I’ll leave it up
Water big, easy hit, soft splash.
I recently left a job where my coworker was the absolute dumbest motherfucker I have ever met, but at least he was willing to listen to people with differing opinions. I think I managed to pull him a little left, at the very least he started out going “the people in charge generally know what is best for us even if they sometimes dip into things themselves” and ended with “fuck ice, they’re fascists acting exactly like the nazis did and the shitbags in charge are enabling them at every turn, the whole system needs reset” which is a pretty big leap, IMO.
One thing I couldn’t budge him on was the moon landing. It doesn’t matter that I have assisted in a laser range-finding experiment using the retro reflectors left on the moon, thus confirming to myself that we HAVE been there.
It didn’t matter how much I explained the Apollo missions, how much I explained why things behave in space the way they do, how much I explained why NASA essentially hd to rebuild a moon mission from the ground up, or any number of things. He still firmly believed it was all bullshit and we never went there.
I would always end the conversation about space stuff with “the biggest reason to me is that the USSR never came out and said ‘this is fake, here’s proof they faked the landing’ and basically gave up not long afterward, and they clearly had spies and intelligence capable of infiltrating NASA systems and obtaining classified information, just look at the Russian space shuttle. If they knew we faked it, they would have every reason in the world to embarss us by revealing our lies to the world” and he would always agree on that point. Still fake to him though
Space deniers are the bottom of the fucking barrel as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what it is about them, or how they got so fucking stupid, but there appears to be no limit to their ignorance.
What I never understood is why the unloading process is so needlessly complicated. After splash down, why not attach a cable and hoist the capsule onto a ship for unloading?
Instead, it’s always this long spectacle of multiple back-and-forth boat trips, inflation and attachment of rafts and ‘porches’, and several helicoptor trips to a ship.
Just build a recovery ship that can park right over the capsule and hoist it on deck.
I think the money required to “just build a recovery ship” is way too high to justify it as an alternative to methods that already work.
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No, no she’s on to something. If they don’t touch down on land why is it called a landing and not a sea-ing.
Checkmate atheists
It’s funny how stupid the population is, until you realize they can vote.
Astronaut: Oh crap, was blue water or land? Screw it, it’s land…oh noooooooo!!! Mr. Dolphin watch out!!!
