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Will The Next Generation of Spacecraft Land In the Water?
Reservoir Hill writes "Work is progressing on the design of the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the next generation of NASA spacecraft that will take humans to the International Space Station, back to the Moon, and hopefully on to Mars. One major question about the spacecraft has yet to be answered. On returning to Earth, should the CEV land in water or on terra firma? After initial studies, the first assessment by NASA and the contractor for the CEV, Lockheed Martin, was that landing on land was preferred in terms of total life cycle costs for the vehicles. Getting the CEV light enough for the Ares rockets to be able to launch it, and therefore eliminating the 1500 lb airbags for landing has its appeal. A splashdown in water seems to be favored."
As someone who worked partially on the CEV, it has been decided. it is in the requirements that Lockheed Martin furnish a vehicle that is capable of both. One of the design limitations now is that it must actually be stable in swells of up to 14 feet, which are not uncommon in the cold North Atlantic - emergency abort scenarios land all launches there during early lift-off stages. There are huge problems with ill-effects of ocean landings for crews and they really are looking to avoid it, but even with parachute and pillow systems, they are looking at potential damage,
The planned Ares V has a mass to LEO of 130,000 kg, the energia has 'only' 88,000 kg, so the solution isn't that simple. Besides, any weight savings on any system is obviously an advantage when the cost per kg is so high.
For the folks saying "use the ISS!': Won't work. When coming back from the moon, the approach speed is far too high to enter the orbit that the ISS or any other reasonable future space station is in. The braking is done through friction as the spacecraft enters the earth's atmosphere, and provides MUCH more delta-v than would be feasible by using rockets.
To use the ISS, the spacecraft would need to perform a complex aerobraking maneuver (basically, a partial re-entry), then have the fuel needed to circularize its new orbit so that it can rendesvous with the ISS. By the time this is done, the design for the capsule is far heavier than the 1,500lb penalty that airbags impose.
My idea, make the water landing a known 'capsule loss' scenario, the same way it is with the Shuttle. If things go _so wrong_ that a water landing is unavoidable (say, launch failure) then design the capsule for quick-egress after a water landing. Airplanes ditch in water and people have time to get out before they sink. My Piper Cherokee will float long enough for me to climb out onto the wing, and for a real shock look at the survival training that helicopter passengers go through in the military, that's some pretty intense worst case scenario stuff.
With Rogallo steerable parachutes, landfall should be available at all times except the first few minutes of launch. Skip the airbags, make the capsule so it stays afloat just long enough for egress, and train the astronauts on how to get out fast.
Yes, sending it "randomly flying" is exactly what I proposed.
You put the package in whatever orbit is convenient (as opposed to the ISS, which isn't convenient), and you know its position as surely as you know that of the ISS, or any other sattelite. Space navigation doesn't involve any "finding", ever.
Why not pick up the landing gear on the way back? Let's investigate.
Recall: Apollo's flight plan was an initial burn to get into earth orbit, another burn to leave orbit on course for the moon (trans-lunar injection), another burn to get in orbit of the moon, and another burn to leave orbit on course for earth (trans-earth injection). That's it. They didn't return to orbit after leaving the moon. They left the moon, coasted for a couple days, hit their entry interface, then hit the Pacific.
Why? Going back into orbit requires adding two more burns: one to enter Earth orbit, and another to leave it. Adding a rendezvous with the ISS (or any other floating payload) means an additional 1-2 burns to match the orbital planes, an additional burn to raise or lower your orbit, and God knows how long until the orbits of the two vehicles sync. Look at the space shuttle: even with matching the orbital planes and scheduling launch for an ideal rendezvous profile, it takes them 36-48 hours to catch up with the space station.
Trans-earth injection is complicated enough without adding all that. Extra burns means extra propellant, which means extra weight, which is exactly what you're trying to avoid. Not to mention, each of those steps is another opportunity for failure, and how do you abort if you don't have landing gear?
This is why they are Rocket Scientists(TM).
Spaceship one was good for getting to the 'edge of space' and back. Being in orbit is a different thing. As a general rule, it takes 30 times as much energy to get into orbit as it does to just get up there. ( the number varies with altitude, of course, but 30 is a good back-of-the-envelope approximation ). The energy that has to be bled off when coming down is roughly 30-fold. So spaceshipOne is not even close to being able to do it. It requires new materials and/or a new design. Or stick with the high maintainence and unpleasant failure rate of the shuttle.
Or you can stick to the simple way of doing it with rockets and parachutes.
No, not really. The Apollos didn't preform any breaking maneuvers on the way back to Earth, they just hit the atmosphere at full speed and scrubbed off their speed there. If you enter shallow enough, you can burn off more speed in the upper atmosphere before you start getting into the thicker air, and a sufficiently durable heat shield turned out to be lighter then the fuel that would have been required to slow the ship down. In fact, even orbiting spacecraft generally burn as little fuel as possible to get themselves just bellow orbital velocity and then do the rest as atmospheric breaking.
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