Yeah, my post was too simplistic. Wings are not categorically an obsolete technique in a launch / re-entry vehicle.It's just that one can't say capsules are bad because they are old-fashioned. (Maybe you didn't mean that but that's the gist of what I understood.)You could likely quite easily soft-land capsules with parawings / parafoils. This seems to me to be the optimal path: very small mass and still precision landings. (Maybe not thousands of kilometers of cross range but tens of kilometers anyway.)http://gravityloss.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/the-last-five-kilometers/Capsules can be extremely light. This solves so many other problems it's a very good idea to look at them hard. Lifting bodies are heavy and things with wings are elephants. Capsules have great margins in control and thermal issues and are very easy to build.I'm not dismissing winged vehicles out of hand. Just saying they start with a significant weight disadvantage, which effects everything down below in the hierarchy, the launcher, ground infrastructure... There are good reasons why all operational re-entry vehicles but one have been capsules.Like there are reasons why airplanes were airplanes and not airships, re-entry craft are not spaceplanes automatically - the environment is different and requires a clean sheet thinking to find the best approach.
Quote from: Patchouli on 09/29/2009 03:34 am...Dragon is the only one of the present crop of capsule vehicles that at least tries to do something better.It did move most of the service module systems into the reentry vehicle and claims to have a reusable LV....What is Dragon doing differently in an ops concept? It launches on a rocket, orbits earth, the service module separates, the capsule lands in the ocean.....sounds real familar.
...Dragon is the only one of the present crop of capsule vehicles that at least tries to do something better.It did move most of the service module systems into the reentry vehicle and claims to have a reusable LV....
But the concept of steerable parachutes is a good one. Wasn't that an early suggested landing mode for Big Gemini? (Landing on extendable struts using a steerable parachute)
That L-M lifting body looks nice... But that thing would have been extremely heavy. Not to mention the added complexity of a lifting body splitting in half in an emergency to just pull the front half away. (I thought first the whole lifting body would have separated, but according to the article above posted by Star-Drive, the lifting body separated in the middle) But the concept of steerable parachutes is a good one. Wasn't that an early suggested landing mode for Big Gemini? (Landing on extendable struts using a steerable parachute)EDIT - I found the Big Gemini landing picture: http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/b/biglandg.jpg