when coming back from space, why do astronauts don’t just use a parachute all the way down?
In: Engineering
Yet the very first soviet cosmonauts did not landed inside their capsule, they were ejected in atmosphere and landed on chutes. Capsules did have chutes as well and made a soft landing alongside the cosmonaut, but there wasn’t much trust in that new systems back then.
The velocity of a stable low earth orbit is over 17,000 miles per hour. That’s way too fast for any kind of parachute system, even if there was enough atmosphere at such altitudes to allow parachutes to deploy effectively. So the initial re-entry requires slowing using other means. Instead a shallow re-entry begins at that speed and a very shallow angle, gradually exchanging speed energy for heat energy produced from slowly increasing atmospheric drag on the re-entry vehicle.
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