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UnspecificGravity@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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.

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ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
For a while (maybe still) Russian rockets even had a shotgun on board after wolves got to a landing first.

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- mkwt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Pixel_Jock_17@piefed.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That sounds way too cool to be true but I’ll take your word for it and do some research lol
    
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    UnspecificGravity@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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
    
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- SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    “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 Glorious Socialist Republic.”
    
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mkwt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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 issues pencils.
  
  Choosing a retroburst system over trusty parachutes is wack.
  
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  - bss03@infosec.pub ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    classic story of the US spending millions on developing pens that write in space while the Soviet Union just issued pencils
    
    You used “story”, so I’ll assume you know this is mostly untrue, but for any of the lucky 10k that hasn’t heard: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._…
    
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  - UnspecificGravity@piefed.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - AMoralNihilist@feddit.uk ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Not so much Navy as geography and allies’ geography.
    
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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I’m upset that you didn’t mention Cosmonauts are equiped with an on board shotgun to fend off bears.

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- Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Moon bears?
  
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  - bridgeburner@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Desmond the Moon Bear
    
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    Zanshi@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    EVERYBODY DO THE FLOP flops
    
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- Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Low key, we gotta pack some shotties in ours. Space race to the death!
  
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Ariselas@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - BCsven@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    They have parachutes for a softer landing on water. They aren’t hitting it at terminal velocity from the free fall
    
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  - elucubra@sopuli.xyz ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    My father was a fighter pilot. He explained that at a sufficiently sharp angle, hitting water was like hitting concrete.
    
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    fred_garvin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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    bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Surface tension is a weird thing chemically/electrostatically, but we also probably don’t have life on Earth without it.
    
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- anomnom@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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mimavox@piefed.social ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Imagine surviving a whole ass moon flight just to perish at sea because no one comes to get you..

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- notoftenthat@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
  Ref
  
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bluesheep@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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

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- turmacar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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tarsisurdi@lemmy.eco.br ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
another thing that’s also not considered here is the fact that astronauts parachute out of the capsule before impact

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- paranoid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  … What?
  
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  - deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Like elevators, if they jump right before impact it doesn’t hurt.
    
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- SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  False. They teleport.
  
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  - TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    No no no… They don’t even have waffle houses in Russia or the ocean.
    
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- teslekova@sh.itjust.works ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  No no no. They dive, so as to hit the water with the least surface area.
  
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- tortina_original@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Nonsense.
  
  They have ejection seats.
  
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brownsugga@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
yes the post may be inaccurate but i doubt the dumbass they were responding to could have even read HALF of your comment

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