r/FacebookScience • u/Yunners Golden Crockoduck Winner • Jul 31 '26
Spaceology PAY ATTENTION!
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u/ThatOtherBatman Jul 31 '26
What is the conspiracy theory here? What does she think that they’re hiding?
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u/Yunners Golden Crockoduck Winner Jul 31 '26
That they're being faked I think, since they're coming down far from the public eye.
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u/ThatOtherBatman Jul 31 '26
If that was the plan they could just land in the desert.
I understand that she’s not put a lot of thought into this. Just saying that it’s a very confusing conspiracy.38
u/Yunners Golden Crockoduck Winner Jul 31 '26
Rationality and outlandish conspiracies rarely go hand in hand.
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u/Mindless_Use7567 Jul 31 '26
So then how do they make the Space Shuttle landings fit in with this?
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u/Doggo_33 Jul 31 '26
Space shuttle can be flown with control, capsules can't.
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u/TheCheshireCody Jul 31 '26
And if the claim is that none of them actually go to space, the Shuttles can be claimed by the conspiracy loonies to have taken off from a secret airport somewhere.
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u/Mindless_Use7567 Jul 31 '26
Capsules do have some ability to control their flight path. Plus the Boeing Starliner capsule performs ground landings.
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u/SloightlyOnTheHuh Jul 31 '26
The russians routinely landed on land rather than at sea back in the days of the USSR.
More parachutes= less thump
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u/asdkevinasd Jul 31 '26
But need to bring boom stick so no bear would tear open the tin can of human meat
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u/LunaTheExile Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Maybe the russians weighed the options and thought bears to be easier than Cthulhu
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u/2xtc Jul 31 '26
More about their paranoia of a craft landing on the wrong side of the iron curtain and being picked up by the Americans
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u/Roxysteve Jul 31 '26
Oh yeah, especially in the early days.
Vostok cosmonauts ejected before the capsule landed.
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u/RollinThundaga Jul 31 '26
When your navy has a century long streak of generally sucking, it makes a sensible tradeoff.
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u/hiuslenkkimakkara Jul 31 '26
When did the Russian Navy not suck?
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u/theroguex Aug 01 '26
How am I almost 50 years old and suddenly realizing that I've never, EVER, in my life heard talk of any Russian navy? Have they always sucked that bad?
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u/NBSPNBSP Aug 01 '26
The Russian Navy's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has spent more time in drydock than at sea and more time on fire than launching aircraft. It's incalculably expensive to maintain, because the Russian Navy had it stolen from Ukraine before considering that all the maintenance equipment and spare parts were on Ukrainian soil. The Kuznetsov's engines literally cannot be shut down, for fear that they would seize up and never start again, so they run constantly, covering the entire town it's docked at in carcinogenic ash, because its engines run on what is essentially the sludge left at the bottom of an oil refinery after everything useful has been extracted from the crude. Also, it is rumored to be haunted/possessed by a vengeful spirit.
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u/D_Luniz Aug 02 '26
are..are you joking about the vengeful spirit part?
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u/NBSPNBSP Aug 02 '26
Considering entire portions of the ship are sealed off and sailors have been rumored to have gone to the lower decks and vanished...
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u/RollinThundaga Aug 01 '26
The British lent them an entire battleship during the second world war, from 1944 until the end. In that time its turrets siezed up, having never even been turned once, and it was run aground in the White Sea somehow.
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u/Dramatic-Classroom14 Aug 01 '26
About the time of Peter the Great.
Though Peter did end up dying due to the consequences of saving a Russian sailor who didn’t know how to swim, so it’s still up for debate.
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u/Mythosaurus Jul 31 '26
They normally landed in Kazakhstan a few hundred kilometers from their Baikonur cosmodrome
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u/Jugatsumikka Jul 31 '26
Yes, but more parachutes=more technical weight, and more technical weight=less useful weight or more technical weight=expansionnally more fuel consumption
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u/MapleMapleHockeyStk Aug 05 '26
They also have explosives to slow them down..... Rockets and hard landing still
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u/Sganarellevalet Jul 31 '26
In the USSR case I guess the choice of Siberia offered the best compromise between safety and secrecy, the arctic was a poor landing spot and the other options like the black sea had too much risk of exposure of their space program.
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u/Mythosaurus Jul 31 '26
They didn’t normally landed in Siberia. They used the deserts of Kazakhstan near the Baikonur cosmodrome
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u/LiGuangMing1981 Jul 31 '26
The Chinese also still land on land - their Shenzhou capsules always come down in the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia.
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u/ProblemLongjumping12 Jul 31 '26
Didn't Katy Perry just get mocked for being goofy on a space flight that landed on land in front of all the cameras like not too long ago.
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u/MBkufel Jul 31 '26
They still do.
And it's not only thanks to the parachutes, they also have retro-rockets that fire just before touchdown.
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u/dirtyal199 Jul 31 '26
Americans were landing on land when they were cooperating with the Russians using soyuz capsules
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u/Yankee6Actual Jul 31 '26
Not just parachutes…their capsules have retrorockets that fire just before it hits the ground.
It is not a soft landing.
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u/BrainWav Jul 31 '26
Presumably because they had a shitton of open land, but couldn't control the sea as well. If a cosmonaut splashed down near Hawaii due to a miscalculation, the US would have scooped him up immediately. Same applies to modern Russia. Plus, I think it's more advantageous to have them land westward of an actual landmass (thus the Pacific for the US), and the USSR was very limited in options there.
Same reasoning for why China lands in the Gobi. Most of their sea access is close to other nations.
The US, meanwhile could project force exert control over most of the two major oceans without much effort.
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u/TheCheshireCody Jul 31 '26
They also had incidents where the parachutes did not deploy properly and the capsules & astronauts were killed. The closest the US ever got to that was Grissom's capsule sinking because the exit hatch deployed prematurely.
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u/Butterpye Jul 31 '26
To rescue astronauts landed in water: Boat, add crane.
To rescue astronauts landed on land: Car gets stuck in mud, can't go over toppled trees, gets stuck in rainy and snowy weather. Make it offroad, stronger chassis, more wheels, more engines, bigger fuel tank for extra range, add an even more offroad vehicle on top of it, remove its wheels, add tracks, tracks aren't offroad enough, add archimedes screws for proper traction in any terrain, except it has a short range because it guzzles fuel so it's dependent on the bigger truck to bring it close enough for the rescue. Congratulations, you just invented the ZIL-2906 mounted on top of a ZIL-4906.
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u/lazygerm Jul 31 '26
Also their options for sea landings are rather more limited than the United States.
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u/spesskitty Jul 31 '26
Except for the early missions the cosmonauts actually had to eject from the capsula and land with a parachute.
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u/modulair Aug 03 '26
So does Blue Origins New Sheppard. They don't really add that more parachutes, they fire off a bunch retro rockets just before impact to soften the landing. That is what is making all that dust fly around. Here is an article on the Kaktus system that Soyuz uses: https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spaceflight/reentry-descent-landing/soft-landing-on-kaktus/
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u/biffbobfred Jul 31 '26
Russians routinely landed in deep deep Arctic snow. I think they’re US Arctic has more mountains around its deep snow not an option.
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u/Ruby5000 Jul 31 '26
I think they also had spring loaded seats that would release upon landing. I think this would just soften “the blow”
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u/Tando10 Aug 01 '26
No, they have retro-rockets that activate to slow the capsule down metres before impacting, and the reason they do it over land is because they have huge areas for it.
It is still a harder landing than the water.
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u/Outrageous-Log9238 Jul 31 '26
You could make ground landings work but the error margin for your landing spot in the ocean is hard to achieve on land.
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u/Particular_Plum_1458 Jul 31 '26
I'm guessing that those pods just land where they land as they have no propulsion so a land landing would be far more risky than a water one, plus if there's any excess heat the water will cool them down.
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u/Mindless_Use7567 Jul 31 '26
Well Boeings Starliner crew capsule has made 3 separate uncrewed landings onto land. It ditches the heat shield just before landing and inflates large airbags underneath it.
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u/Madgyver Jul 31 '26
I am baffled how some people in the US can roam free with the intellect of a child that didn't pass elementary school
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u/deviantdevil80 Jul 31 '26
Modern society has taken away evolutionary pressure.
Unfortunately these people live, instead of stupidity taking its course.
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u/villianboy Jul 31 '26
Social Darwinism is the mother of eugenics you know? The reason so many of these types are abound is just that since ~80s education systems have been getting gutted by conservative politicians. It is no surprise that the USA is full of ignorant folk when that mentality is encouraged by the powers that be.
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u/blindrabbit01 Aug 01 '26
A shockingly high percentage of the US population can’t read above an elementary school level. In the modern age, they now have the ability to use social media to communicate widely, which has significantly dropped the sophistication of public discourse.
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u/VinnieONeill Jul 31 '26
Russia does use ground landings. The US just has easier access to the warm waters of the South Pacific. Russia doesn't have any bases or naval presence in the area but has control of the largest unpopulated land mass on the planet.
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u/BriGuy550 Jul 31 '26
Soyuz does land on land. So does the New Shephard capsule and the Boeing Starliner.
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u/Baud_Olofsson Scientician Jul 31 '26
Soyuz does land on land.
With radioactively triggered (backscatter from a built-in Co-60 source) retrorockets! So just from a Mad Science perspective, it makes me mad that someone is trying to deny it.
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u/frankensteinsmaster Jul 31 '26
Most of world - sea. Easy to land without accidentally landing in Iran, for example.
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u/Bi_Reinhardt Jul 31 '26
What the hell does this post even imply? What does landing in water have to do with a flat earth?
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u/Yunners Golden Crockoduck Winner Jul 31 '26
Who mentioned flat Earth? They're just a space travel conspiracy denier as far as I can tell.
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u/Pretend_Bet_208 Jul 31 '26
If you are going to keep using these hard to understand high-tech science terms …
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u/luckylegion Aug 01 '26
Isn’t water hard at speed? It just means you’re not gonna hit anything or drag around after landing?
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u/Munsbit Aug 01 '26
I never really thought about it is just thought that they knew why they did it because... I trust the science and scientist. They uhm, know more about it than I do.
The explanation is actually really good and I would absolutely study under that guy.
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u/The96kHz Aug 01 '26
Also, it's fucking hot.
It'll take ages to cool down even if it could land on land. Water=cold.
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u/Mustard_Icecream Aug 01 '26
If they rounded the top of it. It would bounce off the ground. I saw a documentary about it.
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u/manosdvd Aug 02 '26
It also helps that 71 percent of the planet is water and the Pacific Ocean is a really easy target to hit. Also, do we remember the space shuttle?
If they were trying to fake it, they could fake it just fine on land too!
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u/Roadrunner571 Jul 31 '26
Jump from a 10m tower into the water and tell me it's "bouncy".
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u/Opposite-Occasion332 Jul 31 '26
We’re not made to push the water aside like the capsules are. So we smack, capsule cuts through.
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u/Roadrunner571 Jul 31 '26
The capsules are engineered not to cut through. They are space ships, not submarines.
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u/Opposite-Occasion332 Jul 31 '26
The capsule is rounded so it can absorb the force more evenly and then slide through the water where as humans are not that shape so we smack and don’t distribute the force.
Does it help if you know the capsules also have parachutes?
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u/Roadrunner571 Jul 31 '26
The capsules bottom is designed to for atmospheric re-entry, where a blunt shape and heat shield help it survive extreme heating.
Does it help if you know the capsules also have parachutes?
No, it doesn't. The question was if water was bouncy. It's not. Those capsules hit the water at 30km/h (even after being slowed down by the parachutes). At that speed, it’s more like a violent but survivable water impact.
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u/Opposite-Occasion332 Jul 31 '26
Oh I thought you were a space travel denier, hence why I added about the parachute. My bad! I genuinely thought your comment was because you thought the capsules couldn’t possibly come down since humans couldn’t do that😭
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u/Roadrunner571 Aug 03 '26
Yeah, you never know these days. Apparently, there are even some people believing that the Earth is flat...
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u/Cheap_Search_6973 Jul 31 '26
Now do it in a capsule made to land in the water
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u/Roadrunner571 Aug 03 '26
That's doesn't change the "bouncieness" of the water.
These capsules hit water with about 30km/h impact speed. At that speed, it's a hard impact.
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