Crew Dragon Astronauts to Return to Earth on August 2
9 responses to “Crew Dragon Astronauts to Return to Earth on August 2”
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Only 1 landing area has to be good. Maybe the weather will change from the time they leave ISS. If it does,they do have landing areas in the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean. A toasted capsule again. Ought to be a real sight looking out the window.
Yeah, too bad the windows aren’t bigger – the shuttle from the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats would have been the all-time view. The Dragon will still be quite the ride coming in though.
Regarding alternate landing (splashing?) sites (well, zones), yes, I’ve read that they do have multiple backup zones, including in the Gulf of Mexico. I think they’ll avoid a Pacific “landing” though unless absolutely necessary as they don’t have a recovery system in place for there
Please consider the standby amphibious warfare assets at naval bases around San Diego as adequate enough to recovered the Crewed Dragon after splashdown. The same assets is tasked with recovery of Orion capsules.
Don’t they have a tendency to either collide with commercial shipping or spontaneously burst into flames? I’ve lost confidence in senior naval leadership.
I’ll bet an LPD can also pick them up. Even with the good Richard’s smoking issues, lesser ships should be able to do the job.
It’s been a bad year for carrier naval forces this past year. Kuznetzov got beat up by her dry dock, then caught fire. The Chinese suffered a major fire on their new LHD, and now we had the same fate on LHD-6. Rough year.
SpaceX recovers Cargo Dragon there so should not be much of a change. People and Cargo are different of course. Dragon itself would be the same. Maybe someone will ask how they would do that at the pre-landing news conference.
SpaceX no longer splashdown off the Baja peninsular with the CRS-2 Cargo Dragons starting with the upcoming CRS-21 mission. The West Coast Dragon recovery boat and the landing
bargedrone ship have been reassigned to the East Coast. SpaceX will have to added additional recovery assets if they want to retrieve Dragon capsules off the West Coast.The drone ships were never involved in Dragon 1 recoveries. SpaceX rented a flat-topped vessel with a recovery crane to fish Dragon 1s out of the drink. Same thing, plus maybe a service boat and standby helo, should suffice for a D2 recovery. There are plenty of suitable recovery assets available on the West Coast.
The providers of the same assets previously used to recover Dragon 1s should still be on Elon’s speed dial.