Slashdot Mirror
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."
Of all the crap I've seen on /. I didn't realize we had unprintable expletives around here? Now, I'm curious - what could be so bad that it can't be printed on a /. page?!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
It's Russian, and Slashdot doesn't support the russian alphabet well?
That's so retro.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
McDonnell-Douglas did this almost 20 years ago - the DC-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X), later known as the Delta Clipper.
It seems pretty inefficient to carry the fuel mass for the retro rocket braking all the way up out of the gravity well into orbit and then back down into the gravity well so you can use it in the last kilometer of the flight. There doesn't seem any way to stop at a gas station on the way down, but maybe they are planning on lifting the fuel to orbit on non-reusable tankers, which also seems inefficient. In something like this, inefficient equates to really fucking expensive.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"Imagine, an expletive so vial it transcends language barriers."
I don't have to imagine it. The word you refer to is "Belgium".
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
It's an urban legend.
It sounds like this just falls without a chute. I'm not going to do the math, but even if it is subsonic at 800m, you are going to have to brake like mad at the end. 10G braking? 20G doesn't sound like it would be outlandish. OK, so it is a short period of time and with solid-fuel rockets it is just one pulse. But it sounds like it would be ohe heck of a pulse.
You're missing the point, though. Gravity is an *acceleration*. These guys will be *decelerating*. You know, like zero gee is zero acceleration? Since they'll be slowing down, they won't feel a thing. It's genius!
(I can feel the karma draining now...)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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
In French Québec, we're lucky enough to combine all four.
And not just in your profanity!
The enemies of Democracy are
I think this will work. It's used extensively on giant robots in Japanese cartoons.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
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
Capsules don't just plummet vertically through the atmosphere. They spend most of the reentry going almost horizontally bleeding off speed. Most of them also angle the heat shield so that they get a good deal of lift, and they "fly" for a more gentle reentry.
In any case, a capsule must slow down to less than hypersonic speeds before deploying a parachute. Otherwise the parachute would burn up and/or be ripped to shreds.
Once a capsule is going slowly enough to put out a chute, it doesn't have all that much kinetic energy. Small retrorockets would be sufficient to stop it instead.