I think that SpaceX thing is supposed to splash down this weekend

Floyd Robertson wrote:The complication is that from the time of undocking, they only have 48 hours of oxygen in the cabin, so they're under a little pressure.

kingstonlake wrote:On C-Span now. I think they undock today and splash down around Pensacola tomorrow.

tGreenWay wrote:

Floyd Robertson wrote:The complication is that from the time of undocking, they only have 48 hours of oxygen in the cabin, so they're under a little pressure.

Floyd Robertson wrote:

tGreenWay wrote:

I'm glad you caught my carefully worded joke lol.

MiamiSpartan wrote:Welcome back, Bob and Doug!

Watch Out Pylon! wrote:Took forever to pop the hatch. Understandable though. Crazy to think the last time a splashdown recovery happened was the end of the Apollo program.

MiamiSpartan wrote:

Nordic wrote:

And once they did get the all clear, it took one dude with a special wrench to loosen a bolt in about 4 seconds.  Didn't even need to squirt any WD40 on it.

I thought the same thing about Apollo. Next question that popped in my head is how do the Ruskies get down from the Space Station?

I think they do a water landing, too. A year or two ago a launch had problems and had to be aborted after launch. They have abort procedures for the capsule to pop off and parachute down, but I remember them being concerned about their safety on a hard landing.

Boris Volynov remained on Soyuz 5. During the re-entry the service module failed to separate after retrofire resulting in nose-first re-entry, which would have meant a sure death of the cosmonaut. In the last moment the bolts connecting the service module to the reentry capsule finally burned through and the capsule turned around, heat shield forward, just before the forward hatch melted. All capsule propellant was exhausted and the cosmonaut made a 9-g uncontrolled reentry, landing hundreds of kilometers short. There was one final problem in store for Boris Volynov when the parachute cables partially tangled. It was one of the hardest landings in space history and Boris Volynov broke his jaw and lost several teeth. The local temperature was -38 °C (-36 °F). On page 274 of the book IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON, Boris Volynov is quoted as saying he stayed inside the capsule after landing with a broken jaw. It was extremwly cold and he only had a thin tracksuit on. There were no buildings for 60 kilometers around him so he waited one hour. Parachutists were the first to arrive.

The crew were to meet Leonid Brezhnev during a lavish ceremony at the Kremlin, but this was ruined by an attempted assassination of the Soviet leader. A man shot eight times at the motorcade but aimed at the car containing Georgi Beregovoy, Aleksei Leonov, Andriyan Nikolayev, and Valentina Tereshkova. They were unharmed but Brezhnev's car was forced to speed away past the waiting Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 crews on the podium.