> I'm told they might have used the kind of balloons they used on the recent Martian landings, but that would have greatly increased the weight -- and therefore > the cost -- of what was supposed to be a relatively inexpensive return system. But I bet they're rethinking that now. Maybe the balloon shock absorber idea could be
turned upside down - you could cover the target zone with balloons. Hmm,
that would be a large area.
OK, how about this: when you figure out where
the sample return capsule is going to land (to within a couple hundred meters),
send planes to carpet-bomb that area with bombs that produce huge masses of foam
for the capsule to plunge into.
Let's see, if you engineer the capsule to
withstand 20 g deceleration, and the capsule comes in at maybe 400 mph terminal
velocity, straight down, and the foam can resist at 20 g, that's maybe only
60-70 ft of foam.
Hmm, but that foam is probably
styrofoam-stiff. Maybe no foaming process is fast enough.
Well, then (yes, I *do* have a million
half-back ideas, thank you for asking) if the foaming gases are shock-reactive,
you might get good deceleration even with a lighter foam. Plus, the whole
foam pad self-disposes by combustion before you can say "environmentalist
picketers." (Heat stress on the capsule? Yeah, but maybe
no worse than what you get already with reentry.)
Call it "scorched-earth splashdown".
Kinda crazy, but maybe not as crazy as trying to sift through a gazillion tiny
shards of silicon and germanium to find a few that can still tell you
something. And if Scorched Earth Splashdown cost $10 million a shot, well,
this splat was a $260 million splat. Maybe it's worth experimenting with
just as a backup to the James Bond Helicopter Retrieve. (And it would
certainly be worthy of a scene from a James Bond movie if it
worked.)
OK, I'll go back to playing with matches
now.
-michael turner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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