I listened to Chris Hadfield describe coming home in a Soyuz capsul and it rolling a few times after hitting the ground. Land works but water sounds more comfortable, as long as you don’t get sea sick on top of it all.
When they were covering the Artemis landing, they mentioned that just returning to earth from weightlessness makes them pretty nauseous, so they get motion sickness meds before landing anyway. Ibuprofen or anti inflammatory meds too, since 1 G is hard on joints after a few days without it.
Water isn’t like in the video games. It’s still a hard landing that you wouldn’t survive if you were going too fast. There’s just much more margin for error trying to hit the ocean vs. a plot of land.
Former Navy rescue swimmer here. Judging height over open ocean is really hard. Especially in rolling seas. Deploy too high and too fast and you fucking skip off the water.
I listened to Chris Hadfield describe coming home in a Soyuz capsul and it rolling a few times after hitting the ground. Land works but water sounds more comfortable, as long as you don’t get sea sick on top of it all.
When they were covering the Artemis landing, they mentioned that just returning to earth from weightlessness makes them pretty nauseous, so they get motion sickness meds before landing anyway. Ibuprofen or anti inflammatory meds too, since 1 G is hard on joints after a few days without it.
Water isn’t like in the video games. It’s still a hard landing that you wouldn’t survive if you were going too fast. There’s just much more margin for error trying to hit the ocean vs. a plot of land.
My father was a fighter pilot. He explained that at a sufficiently sharp angle, hitting water was like hitting concrete.
Surface tension is a weird thing chemically/electrostatically, but we also probably don’t have life on Earth without it.
Former Navy rescue swimmer here. Judging height over open ocean is really hard. Especially in rolling seas. Deploy too high and too fast and you fucking skip off the water.
They have parachutes for a softer landing on water. They aren’t hitting it at terminal velocity from the free fall