How does spaceship land

The commander picks up a radio beacon from the runway Tactical Air Navigation System when the orbiter is about miles km away from the landing site and , feet 45, m high. At 25 miles 40 km out, the shuttle's landing computers give up control to the commander. The commander flies the shuttle around an imaginary cylinder 18, feet or 5, m in diameter to line the orbiter up with the runway and drop the altitude. During the final approach, the commander steepens the angle of descent to minus 20 degrees almost seven times steeper than the descent of a commercial airliner.

When the orbiter is 2, ft m above the ground, the commander pulls up the nose to slow the rate of descent. The pilot deploys the landing gear and the orbiter touches down. The commander brakes the orbiter and the speed brake on the vertical tail opens up. A parachute is deployed from the back to help stop the orbiter.

The parachute and the speed brake on the tail increase the drag on the orbiter. The orbiter stops about midway to three-quarters of the way down the runway. After landing, the crew goes through the shutdown procedures to power down the spacecraft. This process takes about 20 minutes. During this time, the orbiter is cooling and noxious gases, which were made during the heat of re-entry, blow away. Once the orbiter is powered down, the crew exits the vehicle. Ground crews are on-hand to begin servicing the orbiter.

The shuttle's technology is constantly being updated. Next, we'll look at future improvements to the shuttle. On the morning of February 1st, , the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry, more than , feet above Texas. The subsequent investigation revealed the cause of the accident. During lift-off, pieces of foam insulation fell off the ET and struck the left wing. The insulation damaged the heat protection tiles on the wing. When Columbia re-entered the atmosphere, hot gases entered the wing through the damaged area and melted the airframe.

The shuttle lost control and broke up. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close.

Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. The hardy Soviets survived, though they never flew again. Nevertheless, Lopez-Alegria would rather return from space onto terra firma, given the choice. The capsule veered into a ballistic landing that took it hundreds of miles from target. NASA did study terrestrial landing at various points in the pre-shuttle age, but rejected it for several reasons.

At the time, the agency concluded that the United States lacked a properly vast, empty, flat area in the contiguous states. What the country did have was a vast amount of open water: copious access to two oceans, a coastal launch site, and the existing maritime infrastructure to retrieve astronauts from the water.

Another significant consideration in these terrestrial studies was the weight of the spacecraft. But technology improves and objectives change. So Boeing revisited the terrestrial landing question when it started designing its commercial crew vehicle, the Starliner, around Soyuz may have solved its mass challenge the year the Beatles recorded Sgt.

Pepper , but the Russian ship can only cram in three astronauts—half of a space station crew. One key to the expanded seven-passenger, terrestrial-landing vehicle was replacing those retro rockets with airbags. The Starliner will rely on six of them a seventh, in the center, deploys only for an emergency water landing. The outer bag has vents that release pressure upon landing, while the inner tube remains firm.

Not only is the airbag system lighter than the Soyuz rockets, it should be easier on bodies already depleted by half a year in space, McCarley says. Ken Bowersox is one enthusiast. That compares to a tolerable 1. Soyuz passengers already land reclined, with an individually designed seat liner.

But McCarley was determined to improve on that with modern ergonomics. He started with a pile of plywood in his garage. The company also added 3D printing technology to shape an entire custom seat for every Starliner passenger.

Given the compact space available, this involved intensive study of human body types. McCarley, who is a stocky 6'1", and Starliner systems engineer Melanie Weber, who stands a bit shy of five feet, modeled themselves for the outer limits of permissible size.

The Boeing team also wanted to improve on the Soyuz-era parachutes. As for where the capsule will set down, the Starliner team is more comfortable with their precision landing than were early NASA engineers.

Ground crews have been combing for long-forgotten telephone poles and other obstacles, and conducted extensive environmental and cultural surveys to ensure both the safety of the astronauts and the integrity of the land. The Dugway Proving Ground, for example, was established by the Army during World War II to test chemical and biological weapons, and also happens to be an archaeological treasure trove of Native American artifacts dating back 13, years.

In January , the company posted a futuristic second video depicting a tidy trapezoidal spacecraft making an unhurried vertical landing sans parachute, buoyed by flames shooting out from the four corners of its base at approximately degree angles. But those flame-shooting SuperDraco thrusters, as Musk subsequently named them, were aimed at more than lowering a 14,pound Crew Dragon capsule onto a helicopter pad anywhere on Earth.

SpaceX insisted they could bring a ship of similar mass safely to the surface of Mars, where the atmosphere is too thin to land anything of that weight by parachute. SpaceX unveiled a Crew Dragon prototype in with high hopes for its prospects on two planets. In , it posted video of a test model hovering confidently several yards above a platform in Texas. Then Musk called it off.

A routine propulsion-landing Crew Dragon seems destined to become a footnote to exploration history, though SpaceX continues to work on the technology for its other vehicles, including the next-generation BFR rocket—an as-yet untested space bus that promises to carry up to passengers to the moon or beyond.

The first paying customer for that trip, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, was announced in September. Luckily, the company had a proven Plan B for getting crew to the space station.

While SpaceX was fiddling with the futuristic system for a crewed ship, as this magazine went to press its cargo ship has quietly flown 15 successful missions to and from the space station, the capsule splashing down without incident.

The company has so far managed to reuse four of the capsules despite the saltwater dunking. The Crew Dragon is about 50 percent heavier than the cargo model, so SpaceX is compensating for the extra mass with a system of four parachutes that release symmetrically above the vehicle, offering more drag than the classic triangle that unfurled above returning s capsules. A still more noticeable difference from days of yore will be the modest flotilla SpaceX deploys to recover Dragon astronauts at sea.

Published plans call for a single foot ship, the GO Searcher , with support from several inflatable boats that can maneuver closer to the splashed-down capsule. The GO Searcher will be equipped with a helipad to ferry astronauts quickly to shore if necessary. Landings became more accurate quickly, though, and the welcoming party dropped to four vessels by the last Apollo moon flight in