NASA Tests Heaviest Chute Drop Ever

Iddo Genuth writes "NASA and the US Air Force have successfully tested a new super-chute system aimed at reclaiming reusable Ares booster rockets. On February 28, 2009 a 50,000-pound dummy rocket booster was dropped in the Arizona desert and slowed by a system of five parachutes before it crashed to the ground. The booster landed softly without any damage. This was possibly the heaviest parachute drop ever, and NASA is planning to perform even heavier drops of up to 90,000 pounds in the next few months."

Comments

Re:Astroid Net?

[khallow]

Afraid not. Parachutes work by increasing air drag. An incoming asteroid would be moving at something like 30 miles per second. The parachute would only have at most a couple of seconds to work. Having said that, if you had a boundary case of an asteroid that would lose a considerable portion of its energy to the atmosphere, but still have enough to cause significant property damage, then you could attach an inflatable balloon (I believe they call it a "ballute") to the front to increase the cross-sectional area of the asteroid, so it would lose more energy to the upper atmosphere. Those asteroids are probably too infrequent to bother planning for.

Re:What Is The Upside To Reusing The Booster?

[berglin]

But then we wouldn't have known how to build a reusable shuttle, which I'm sure left some residual science in other fields as well.

Some things are worth doing just for the sake of it.

to hell with parchutes

[jollyreaper]

I want to see flyback boosters! There was a design they had for the shuttle boosters that would replace them with liquid-fueled models and they would also come equipped with jet engines. Launches as a liquid-fueled rocket, separates from the shuttle stack, deploys swing wings (which were flush with the airframe at launch) and fire up the conventional jets to make a powered return flight, landing at the Cape pretty as you please.

I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles. The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack. The refurb cost on the shuttle makes you think it might just be cheaper to throw it away but maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?