Here a clip from “Richard Hammond’s Miracles of Nature” that shows our canister falling from the edge of space, from the camera’s point of view.
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Note: The clips have been pulled from youtube but the entire episode is now up.
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This is amazing. Could you build a rocket with this type of protection? I’m thinking of a two stage rocket where the first stage retracts it’s engines into a protected section right after stage separation.
Alternatively this technology could be used for landing mars rovers. Airbags were used for Spirit and Opportunity. Curiosity was too big for airbags to be used so the sky-crane was built. Its seems to me that a protective canister could be both less massive and less costly than a sky-crane and wouldn’t kick up as much debris on landing or have as many failure modes.
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