Surely it would be parachute+burn just like Soyuz. I couldn’t ever imagine a scenario where a capsule was travelling at speed and relying on a last-minute (or last-five-second) suicide burn to decelerate before touchdown.
Surely it would be parachute+burn just like Soyuz. I couldn’t ever imagine a scenario where a capsule was travelling at speed and relying on a last-minute (or last-five-second) suicide burn to decelerate before touchdown.
I think that was the original goal they were shooting for especially considering parachutes not being very effective on mars, but I think SpaceX changed their strategy going forward.
That was basically the plan for propulsive landing. You would do a very quick test fire of the engines at high altitude, if any of them did not perform correctly it would deploy parachutes and land in the ocean. If the brief test fire went okay then you would continue towards the landing site and do a very brief landing burn. The capsule does have 8 engines in 4 little pods of 2 engines each, I don't know exactly what the engine out capability was, I believe in theory you could lose like one engine per pod and the capsule could still land.Originally Posted by Rare White Ape
Anyway the advantage to this would be you land back at the launch site at the capsule can be reused quickly, you aren't like repacking parachutes and replacing explosives and all the body panels that got blown off and all that. If you do a parachute landing on land Soyuz style you are going to have to land in a desert somewhere, you aren't going to be able to target a small landing pad like the Falcon 9 currently does and Dragon was planned to.
There are also a lot of challenges with it, and it would look pretty scary, it would definitely look like it was going to hit the ground.
Folks in it won’t be able to see how fast the ground is moving towards them anyway...
Maybe just jump up, just before it hits the ground!
For those who haven't seen it, this was Dragon's pad abort test. The engines in this test are the same ones that would have theoretically been used to land it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8
It's got a pretty good thrust to weight ratio. Even as a person who worked there and generally had an idea of what it was going to do, I was still pretty surprised by how fast it takes off!
Ahh so it was meant to be a ‘schute-less propulsive landing.
Crazy.
They should’ve gone full Kerbal and used breakable struts that jut out from the capsule and decelerate it mechanically.
Though really I suppose it would never have been as violent as I’m imagining. The trip down through the atmosphere would slow it down to transonic speeds very quickly, and it would be going less than 300km/h before it reached 5km altitude. That pad abort travelled to 1km in 15 seconds after a 5 second burn, which is 240km/h.
That’s about as fast as a really fast car, but vertically!
Current rumors has a Human dragon launch in July... Who is down?
Well, everyone except the crew, who will definitely be up.
Ill see what I can do...
passport - valid
visa - valid till Nov
flights (more accurately, money to pay for flights) - back to work!!
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