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Russian Manned Space Vehicle May Land With Rockets
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Russia's next-generation manned space vehicle may be equipped with thrusters to perform a precision landing on its return to Earth. Previous manned missions have landed on Earth using a parachute or, in the case of space shuttles, a pair of wings. Combined with retractable landing legs and a re-usable thermal protection system, the new system promises to enable not only a safe return to Earth, but also the possibility of performing multiple space missions with the same crew capsule. The spacecraft will fire its engines at an altitude of just 600-800m, as the capsule is streaking toward Earth after re-entering the atmosphere at the end of its mission. After a vertical descent, the precision landing would be initiated at the altitude of 30m above the surface. Last July, Korolev-based RKK Energia released the first drawings of a multi-purpose transport ship, known as the Advanced Crew Transportation System (ACTS), which, at the time, Russia had hoped to develop in co-operation with Europe. 'It was explained to us how it was supposed to work and, I think, from the technical point of view, there is no doubt that this concept would work,' says Christian Bank, the leading designer of manned space systems at EADS-Astrium in Bremen, Germany. However, the design of the spacecraft's crew capsule had raised eyebrows in some quarters, as it lacked a parachute — instead sporting a cluster of 12 soft-landing rockets, burning solid propellant. Inside Russia, the idea apparently has many detractors. During the formal defense of the project, one high-ranking official skeptical of the rocket-cushioned approach to landing reportedly used an unprintable expletive to describe what was going to happen to crew members unlucky enough to encounter a rocket engine failure a few seconds before touchdown."
McDonnell-Douglas did this almost 20 years ago - the DC-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X), later known as the Delta Clipper.
From TFA, the fuel is solid. Not easy to refill from tankers.
It's an urban legend.
This again? Let it die.
NASA didn't fund the pen at all.
When it was developed, BOTH the Russians and the US adopted it's use.
Before that, they BOTH used grease pencils, because broken graphite and flammable wood are loads of fun in space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and_Russian_space_programs
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Without use of Kazakhstan, Russia has only a narrow strip of land that stretches far enough south to be worth launching from - and landing at. And this is not a flat desert wasteland. The reason for the rockets is to allow for a controlled landing. Parachutes are more suited for an ocean or desert landing where a few miles of accuracy doesn't make much difference. Presumably they figured that the weight of the landing system is outweighed by the benefit of launching (and landing) at a more southern latitude. Ocean landings aren't exactly free, either.
Lol, you accidentally the whole equation.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
The existing Soyuz TMA capsules also have "soft-landing rockets", they're used just at the point of touchdown to cushion the landing. Of course, the TMAs also have a parachute, so it's less of a problem if the landing rockets fail.
Interestingly, the very first Soyuz TMA had all kinds of other problems, but the landing-rocket part actually worked.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
The high ranking official and flying expletive both refer not to the spacecraft design of today, but to the Zarya spacecraft of 80's. Read the article carefully - it mentions that; only the /. quote is wrong.
The energy to stop a falling box of people is nowhere near the same energy it takes to get it up to where it fell from when you're dealing with high speeds. Aerodynamic resistance is signficant even on a bicycle at 30mph, never mind a space reentry behicle.
The atmospheric drag does work both ways. But on the way up, a rocket presents an aerodynamically efficient profile - i.e pointy bit first. On the way down reentry vehicles go what you might call butt first, presenting the most aerodynamically *inefficient* profile possible.
I think I know what you're talking about. I remember when I was young, going to some sort of space museum (I think it was part of the NASA facility near Cleveland, OH), and they had a space capsule (well, it might have just been a replica - don't remember if it was real or now). But, the capsule was presented 'detached' from the rocket, and it had a very wide, slightly rounded 'bottom', which they said during re-entry orients itself towards the ground, so all the air is colliding with the large surface-area bottom, creating a lot of drag.
I suppose this proposed Russian design is at least somewhat similar.
It's the BBC; if he used a term in Mat', the colloquial translation would be outside the range of what could be considered 'good taste', and in many cases the literal translation would be equally vulgar.
Not exactly. Half of the list are just ordinary words with negative meaning. Lithuanian really lacks strong swearwords of lithuanian origin. So we import the majority from russian, some from polish. But this does not mean that lithuanians swear in foreign language. Usually some description is combined with foreign swearwords to make a satisfactory expletive. The curious side effects of this is that lithuanians can understand perfectly russian swearing, but not vice versa, and that some really bad russian swearwords sometimes can pass just as a salty language. Sometimes I really envy other languages for having original swearwords, lithuanian ones for some reason vanished. I really doubt that they never existed.