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Splashdown is the method of landing a spacecraft or launch vehicle in a body of water, usually by parachute. This has been the primary recovery method of American capsules including NASA’s Mercury , Gemini , Apollo and Orion along with the private SpaceX Dragon .
The spacecraft went from a screaming orbital speed of 17,500 mph (28,000 kph) to 350 mph (560 kph) during atmospheric reentry, and finally to 15 mph (24 kph) at splashdown.
This achieved a greater spacecraft-booster separation through a kind of "pop-gun" effect. By using this technique, the spacecraft separated at velocity of about 28.1 ft/s (8.6 m/s) rather than 15 ft/s (4.6 m/s) using the old procedure. The Mercury-Redstone 4/Liberty Bell 7 mission would take advantage of this new procedure.
Full Description: On January 28, 1986, the Challenger space shuttle and her seven-member crew were lost when a ruptured O-ring in the right solid rocket booster caused an explosion soon after launch. This photograph, taken a few seconds after the accident, shows the main engines and solid rocket booster exhaust plumes entwined around a ball of ...
Skylab 4 (also SL-4 and SLM-3 [2]) was the third crewed Skylab mission and placed the third and final crew aboard the first American space station.. The mission began on November 16, 1973, with the launch of Gerald P. Carr, Edward Gibson, and William R. Pogue in an Apollo command and service module on a Saturn IB rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, [3] and lasted 84 days, one hour ...
The Space Shuttle Columbia was lost as it returned from a two-week mission when previously detected damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system (TPS) resulted in the spacecraft breaking apart during reentry at an altitude of just under 65 km and a speed of about Mach 19. Investigation revealed that a piece of foam insulation had fallen ...
After a 26-day mission that took it on a historic journey around the moon, NASA’s next-generation Orion capsule has returned to Earth. The uncrewed spacecraft had a "picture perfect splashdown ...
Mercury-Atlas 9 was the final crewed space mission of the U.S. Mercury program, launched on May 15, 1963, from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.The spacecraft, named Faith 7, completed 22 Earth orbits before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, piloted by astronaut Gordon Cooper, then a United States Air Force major.