Soyuz Lands in Kazakhstan
Space Station Crew Including NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough Return to Earth
“Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough of NASA is among three crew members from the International Space Station (ISS) who returned to Earth Monday, after 173 days in space, landing in Kazakhstan at approximately 7:20 a.m. EDT (5:20 p.m. Kazakhstan time). Also returning were Flight Engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The three touched down southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.”
That is some landing.
A little too “kinetic” for my taste.
To be fair, a lot of the dirt you see is from the retro-rockets which fire right before landing. That “cushions” the landing quite a bit.
Yes, but a “squeaker” rolling onto 15 or 33 is a whole different world.
I wonder how rough the ride was on the inside when the capsule got yanked across the ground.
Ever seen old cars that required a hand-crank? That’s how this sort of landing will look in only a few years.
I’d give almost anything to be alive in 2117.
How so? Beginning more than 50 years ago, landing spacecraft by parachute was SOP for more than ten years. Then, landing on a runway was the ‘proper’ way to do it, with the Soyuz landings appearing as a quaint holdover.
Yet at this time both COTS 2 vendors and NASA itself intend to return their crewed spacecraft via parachutes with only one of them hoping, eventually, to land completely propulsively. (https://spaceflightnow.com/… ) Only Sierra Nevada & the USAF have runway landing as SOP at this time.
Ballistic entry and landing via parachute is a viable means of getting a spacecraft down from orbit onto the ground. Like having wings, it offers certain advantages while introducing certain limitations…like any engineering design. It may be with us for many, many more years.
What exactly do you see as eliminating its viability?
It isn’t just the parachutes. As others have pointed out, the fundamental problem is the lack of control. Several people have gotten minor injuries. One Soviet capsule impacted in a lake and sank partly underwater, blocking the hatch and cabin vent. The crew were trapped overnight and nearly suffocated. The Orion has not one, not two, but three possible stable floatation attitudes, two of which block the hatch, and if it lands on land who knows what will happen.
A modern sport parachute is essentially an aircraft; a skydiver can control his course and descent rate with great precision, and touch down precisely on a target with a sink rate near zero. Ask a skydiver if he would want to jump with a parachute that combines a high sink rate, opening at high altitude so it can drift a long way, and absolutely no control. I doubt any would want to chance it.
There was the Rogallo paraglider which was planned for Gemini but they couldn’t get it perfected in time. It was then considered for Apollo Applications Program and MOL, but those both got cancelled. Testing never did go well with the Gemini capsules. With larger, heavier capsules I would think the problems would only be magnified.
The reason the Rogallo wing was a failure is that it combined extremely low aspect ration, resulting in a very low lift to drag ratio, with the need for large rigid struts, extremely difficult to deploy. When the decision was made to recover the Gemini at sea (a reasonable decision as, unlike the Orion, it always floats upright) the guided parachute provided no advantage.
Modern ram-inflated-airfoil precision guided cargo parachutes of much greater capacity than would be needed for even the heavy Orion, are available off the shelf and have been for years. They don’t look anything like the Rogallo design proposed for Gemini. Why doesn’t NASA want to use them? I cannot figure it out. http://faculty.nps.edu/oaya…
A) JPADS only came online in 2006. Much too late to be considered a proven system for the intentionally archaic Orion under Constellation. The post-2010 rebooted Orion, under SLS, was largely already a locked in design, with no room for “risky” changes, like completely redesigning the parachute system.
B) JPADS doesn’t allow redundancy. Orion can lose one of its parachutes and still land safely. JPADS is a one-and-done system. In reality, a single large ram-air canopy is much less likely to fail than three-interfering-circular-‘chutes; but the perception is there, and JPADS didn’t have a track-record.
Very interesting. The last point where it would have made sense was when the decision was made to abandon the air bags and switch to ocean recovery. JPADS might have allowed Orion to stick with the original concept of land recovery, which would have avoided some costs and complications associated with ocean recovery.
OTOH, think how much perceived risk it would have added, and the expected cost of retiring that risk to the satisfaction off all-who-need-to-sign-off-on-it.
Saying “simple, proven Apollo method” seems to be the politically safest path for any Orion contractor and admin, even if the actual TRL is lower than a more modern alternative, given the mass of the capsule.
As far as I can remember, Apollo didn’t have to contend with SRBs…
“simple, flight-proven Shuttle technology”.
I had no idea that a single parachute is more reliable than three. Thanks for the info!
Well, before you jump out of a plane, remember it’s “something you read on the internet”.
The reasoning is that the triple-‘chute adds additional failure modes simply be trying to independently deploy three canopies and sets of lines. In some recent drop tests, one of the three canopies failed to deploy. Lose two and you might exceed the capacity of the third (as well as having the two collapsed canopies and lines potentially interfering with the last intact ‘chute.)
AIUI, single circular canopies are much more reliable than single ram-air types. But trying to simultaneously deploy three large canopies from the same anchor point is not.
I read in Al Worden’s book Falling to Earth that one of their 3 parachutes collapsed, possibly from the RCS fuel being released and eating through the lines. In this case it was a good thing there were 2 other chutes..it was probably a pretty hard landing though.
Who knows? I don’t. Parachute design is a mature and dependable technology, true, though even so it is difficult to control. And landing a spacecraft dangled at the end of a rope has a certain inelegance about it.
In any case, my comment goes more to faith in technology, and of engineers driving the technology, than it does to direct knowledge.