Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Second stage recovery, II

Prior to coming across the flyable Saturn V stuff, I was reading up on making the second stage survivable. In order to accomplish that, I checked into some information about the Shuttle's heat protective tiles.

It looks like the mass of the tiles was such that it could be added to a second stage so that it doesn't burn up on reentry. The second part is to assure it isn't damaged as it contacts the water. Of course, there would be parachutes in order to slow down the impact, but even so, the impact may be significant enough to cause damage. So far, I've haven't checked any further on that possibility.

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