The article mentioned in the future the capsule will use thrusters to land on the ground. Is this something that has been done before or is that a new advancement?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiZel9DLeRs
The idea is for Dragon to have engines that would allow the crew to abort mission at any point (launch included) and land anywhere in the solar system (e.g. I read [1] that because of thin atmosphere on Mars they're making Super Dracos capable of firing when the vehicle is supersonic).
EDIT
[1] - http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/05/spacex-...
"The escape system's motors will allow the capsule to land anywhere in the solar system, whether it has an atmosphere or not - and that's pretty cool. These motors can even fire supersonically which is important for Mars: in the higher altitudes of Mars the atmosphere is so thin that parachutes are completely pointless. So retro thrusters have to be able to fire when you are supersonic so they have to be very high thrust."
Curiosity isn't required to use the elaborate floating crane, but I'm guessing some feature or requirement of the mission made placing the engines above the craft more appealing than placing them below.
The crane drops off its payload, then flies well away from the landing site before hitting the ground.
I dont know of any ship that has the ability to land like that, except for craft in development like from blue origins - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NANePoo_p30
I believe the Soyuz uses rockets to slow its decent before it hits the ground, but thats to assist the parachute rather than replace them.
Also, John Carmack's Armadillo aerospace have made prototype rockets that can land vertically on their own thrusters. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8eb_1318290493
Is blue origin going to compete with Musk? I don't think Jeff will leave Amazon and focus on this 100%?
Really amazing times.
That's how they land tanks. Parachutes first, and then one second before the impact boosters go off and slow the cargo down for a soft touchdown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4XVhoezrzM
If you believe SpaceX's concept videos they're gonna do it without parachutes. I have no idea why, though. Parachutes are good. Perhaps they're just thinking ahead, because they want an all-purpose capsule that can land on the Moon just as well as the Earth.
But I'm gonna do it in a week when there's nothing particularly inspiring going on, just to avoid the resume crush. :)
A combination, though, to aim your parachute to a precise location, would be cheaper than thrusters alone, and less chancy than a parachute alone ("Sir, sir, calm down, what do you mean, 'a space ship just landed on my car'?")
They may use parachutes at higher altitudes to slow the craft then thrusters at the final landing
First, precision: landing on a pad is operationally vastly superior than landing in a several mile drop zone. The latter must be in some depopulated area for safety, which has obvious downsides. Being able to land without bringing into play a whole search and rescue aparatus is huge.
Second, turnaround time. Parachutes are fussy, and re-installing new, carefully packed chutes along with all the pyro bolts and whatnot and verifying the whole system checks out is an expensive and complex thing to do for each flight. Landing on rockets means that you only need to inspect and refuel before the next flight, which you would need to do regardless, is very much streamlined compared to the use of parachutes.
However, in case of a normal landing, it lets you land near pre-positioned processing facilities, and saves you the currently long transit time from the landing site to decommissioning that the spacecraft is currently on. (A couple of days at sea to the docks, and then trucked to SpaceX facilities elsewhere for propellant off-loading and other processing.)
As to not repacking parachutes --- the 'chutes will still be there, as a backup system, and I expect that at least the first few times a reused Dragon is launched, they'll have inspected everything pretty thoroughly to determine that it was still operable. Economy starts with not building another one completely from scratch; further measures can come later.
bad_alloc 42 minutes ago | link [dead]
NASA is (more or less) using the same technique with the Mars Science Lab, currently en route to Mars. The only differences are that the rover is smaller and that they use a sky crane (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw&feature=relat...). Landing on Earth however is always done by parachute, as we have enough atmosphere to slow down the lander. So you can say it's a new advancement for landing on earth. As we have quite a lot of gravity here (compared to Mars or the Moon) SpaceX will probably have to sigificantly improve the technology required for a powered landing, especially when they intend to land their first stage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...).
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