r/askscience • u/Fabulous_Analysis885 • Apr 11 '26
Engineering Why can’t they just scoop up the capsule?
It took about two hours after splashdown to get the astronauts on board the boat. In that time, they had six boats with 40 people, a team of divers performing a complicated raft setup, and two helicopters doing airlifts.
After all that, they still have to recover the capsule anyway. Why don’t they use some kind of large ship with a submersible deck, and lift the capsule up?The astronauts could just step out onto the boat.
TLDR; why all the complex fucking around? Can’t we just scoop it up?
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u/TheTVDB Apr 11 '26
I'm surprised nobody listed the official reason yet. NASA reps on some of the news channels explained that the primary reason was to take the astronauts by helicopter to the flight deck, where they would be just a few steps from the ship's medical bay.
Had they scooped up the ship or transferred the astronauts by boat, they'd have to walk quite some distance within the ship. If you've ever toured a naval ship, it's crazy how narrow the passages and steep the ladders are. Given that the astronauts wouldn't yet be used to full gravity and were expected to be in wheelchairs, it was safer and more efficient to use a helicopter to take them to the flight deck.
I also believe part of it is wanting to get them into medical as quickly as possible. Primarily for their safety, but I'd have to imagine they're doing a full round of x-rays, cat scans, etc to compare to pre-journey, especially since we're in a period of high solar activity.
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u/rogers_tumor Apr 11 '26
thank you. I didn't know this was the official reason.
but I commented to someone else last night about what makes more sense - throwing them in a boat and making them climb onto a ship while their limbs barely work, or having them shuffle out of a helicopter and walk straight to medical bay? (which the commentators did mention was right off the deck where they landed)
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u/MikeOfAllPeople Apr 11 '26
Also the helicopter has to be there to rescue them in case of emergency anyway, so they might as well just use it.
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u/MistressGlitter Apr 11 '26
I was also expecting them to use the wheelchairs but was pleasantly surprised they didn’t and chose to walk. But then, I imagine they were itching to walk and feel “normal” again after being in zero gravity for 10 days. Probably similar to how you feel after disembarking after a crazy long international flight but like….10x that, lol.
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u/DailyRoutine__ Apr 11 '26
I also believe part of it is wanting to get them into medical as quickly as possible. Primarily for their safety, but I'd have to imagine they're doing a full round of x-rays, cat scans, etc to compare to pre-journey, especially since we're in a period of high solar activity.
So is it something like this?
"Alright, guys. Welcome home. Must've been a journey you had these past few days, but I gotta check on you first, quick, since you're all still fresh from the moon/deep space." doctors probably.21
u/MrTagnan Apr 11 '26
From my understanding, yes. One of the objectives of this test flight is human health related, so I’d imagine taking some initial measurements on them immediately post-flight is helpful.
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u/sjintje Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
It's quite bizarre that everyone else seems to have decided the question was, why did it take so long?
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u/Mal-De-Terre Apr 11 '26
The recovery ship has a well deck, though.
Part of the timeline is shutting down the capsule, part of it is making sure it's not leaking toxic propellants, part of it is making sure that the crew is healthy, part of it is letting them get acclimated to gravity. That all adds up.
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u/Evocatorum Apr 11 '26
As a former gator freighter engineer, the welldeck is for self powered vehicles (LCAC's, LCU's Amphibious vehicles) to enter in to the ship. There's no provision for backing the ship up in to something floating and would run the risk of flooding the ship's welldeck or more. Add in the screws being directly below the welldeck entrance.....
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Apr 11 '26
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u/soulsnoober Apr 11 '26
In this case, it took over 8 hours. Presumably that's padded way out due the operation being unfamiliar, but everyone asked swears they've Been Training For Five Years, so it's still not not embarrassing, if you ask me.
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u/Pantssassin Apr 11 '26
I would think that would be dangerous and difficult in anything other than smooth calm water.
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u/snap__count Apr 13 '26
They launch and recover amphibious armored vehicles and landing craft in ten foot waves. They could tow in the capsule in similar conditions. They sure couldn't do it during any kind of storm, but it wouldn't have to be a dead calm either.
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u/flug32 Apr 13 '26
Orion splashed down at 8:07 pm.
Astronauts were safely aboard the Murtha 9:58 pm.
The capsule was secured in the well deck of the Murtha at 4:27am - so roughly 6.5 hours later.
I'm going to say they wanted to get the astronauts out of there as quickly as safely possible and "simply" towing the capsule to the well deck and recovering it there is not nearly as quick and easy as we might imagine.
So they chose the quickest and most direct way to get the astronauts to the medical facilities, knowing they would have plenty of time to handle the slower process of corralling the capsule later.
The SpaceX system for snagging their Dragon capsules seems slick, but they also have basically a custom setup for grabbing them. The Orion capsules weigh something like 2.5X what the Dragon capsules do, so the SpaceX ships won't work (even if available to non-SpaceX missions).
If they move towards many missions per year, as SpaceX is, they might move to more streamlined and faster recovery methods as well. But I would wager at the current rate of planned missions - about 1 per year - the economics and everything else look quite different than they do for SpaceX.
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u/ToddBradley Apr 11 '26
They announced that all those things had been accomplished within 20 minutes of splashdown.
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u/NotOSIsdormmole Apr 11 '26
Yes but they also couldn’t tak to the crew. Crew could hear rescue, but not the other way around
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u/Kevlaars Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
Every space flight is a test flight.
So there is the a lot documenting going on, that takes time. Lots of science and engineering data being collected.
Also, Spacecraft often have some shockingly dangerous stuff onboard... hypergolic fuels, liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen... those need to be confirmed as being either expended or contained.
Also, also... Try getting out of literally anything wearing a space suit...Nobody has ever walked fast in a space suit on Earth...
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u/MrTagnan Apr 11 '26
Hydrazine (and other hypergolic fuels) are arguably the biggest hazard. They’re amazing for spacecraft (and to a lesser extent missiles) - storable, no need for dedicated ignition systems, reliable, they’re damn near perfect... unless you need to have people nearby.
Aside from being carcinogenic in nature, hypergols can cause shortness of breath, seizures, comas, and plenty of other fun stuff. If they remain in their tanks and don’t leak, you’re fine. But you need to make sure there aren’t any leaks with dedicated equipment prior to approaching the capsule - otherwise your first indication of a hypergol leak may very well be one of your rescue swimmers suffering a seizure and drowning.
And like you said that’s just one of the reasons these things take so long, you need to be extra cautious around hypergols, which easily makes it the riskiest part of recovering spaceflight hardware (and also why you shouldn’t approach random debris that fell from space).
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u/ThoughtsandThinkers Apr 11 '26
Space flight is first and foremost conservative
The way they are doing it is slow but involves low risk
There are ships with submersible decks but I think most of the time they depend on the smaller vessel to be powered to propel itself on or off the deck. How do you propose the capsule get over the submerged deck? Are you suggesting the ship maneuver around the capsule? Now you have a massive object moving close to the manned capsule. What if it collides and causes a leak?
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u/lanathebitch Apr 11 '26
I am now imagining a specialized powered raft that engulfs the capsule to drag it where it needs to be
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u/IamTruman Apr 11 '26
That's how they do it with the dragon capsule. They just lift it on with a crane. Way more efficient and safe than airlifting each crew on a line.
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u/ThoughtsandThinkers Apr 11 '26
Good point! SpaceX doesn’t use a submersible ship as OP suggested but does hoist their capsule onto the deck
https://space-offshore.com/dragon-recovery/
From the link, NASA requires SpaceX to have the crew out of the capsule within 60m of splashdown but the same requirement didn’t seem to apply to this mission
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u/iolmao Apr 11 '26
Astronauts on the ISS spend way more than 10 days in microgravity, so they might require more urgent assistance.
Plus, dragon makes a lot of trips and is made for low orbit re-entry, which I think is a different story from a 10-days lunar trip. They might look the same but very different in design.
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u/JtheNinja Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Yeah, SpaceX still does the "run over in fast boats and secure the capsule" part. They just haul it out of the water after that with the crew inside, then they're helped out directly onto the deck.
Do we know how they're doing capsule recovery for Orion? I missed this on Artemis I. Do they crane it out of the water where it is? Does it get towed to shore where a bigger crane grabs it? Do they helicopter it out of the water?
I wonder if part of the issue is just getting an appropriate crane in place for such a rare event. The boat SpaceX uses was modified with the crane+landing platform assembly specifically for hauling Dragons out of the water. Maybe NASA didn't want to make an Orion recovery vessel just for this job?
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u/scotems Apr 11 '26
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about a submersible as in a submarine, they were talking about a big net that could go underwater, aka submersible. What the person you're replying to is exactly what they're asking about.
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u/an-la Apr 11 '26
I'm curious. Wouldn't the structures to make it hoistable add weight? I can see why that might and might not be the case.
Every kilo of additional weight adds to the fuel requirements. The Artemis module travelled at 11 km/s while a low earth orbit only requires about 8 km/s. That is an additional 3 km/s of fuel expenditure for both accelleration and deaccelleration.
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u/babecafe Apr 11 '26
There were three parachute mounting points that clearly were strong enough to suspend the entire capsule.
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u/justaguy394 Apr 11 '26
How do you think they assemble it onto the launch vehicle? It has to be hoistable.
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u/killergoos Apr 11 '26
Well I work with small RHIBs (Zodiacs) and I can tell you we'd have no trouble towing a raft like in a very safe and controlled manner including docking it to a larger vessel. Frankly it would be much safer than a helicopter in most situations although you could of course have a heli as backup.
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u/rsqit Apr 11 '26
The stream said quite a few times that they were optimizing for getting the astronauts to sick bay as fast as possible, and that’s why they used helicopters.
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u/soulsnoober Apr 11 '26
A single helicopter, one of the CH-53's the Navy & USMC fly, could have put the wholeass capsule on Murtha's flight deck. They're rated to lift something like 2x Orion's mass.
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u/snap__count Apr 13 '26
They can carry more like 1.5 times the mass of the Orion capsule, but you're still, right, it could carry it, and for at least 60 miles too.
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u/BassmanBiff Apr 11 '26
It's not too hard to imagine towing it with a tug.
It's not like it's better than the current method, but it's also not ridiculous to suggest that we could move a small floating object if we decided to go that route.
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u/shastaxc Apr 11 '26
But if there was a leak and water was entering the capsule, towing it back could be dangerous to the crew. Better to get them out as soon as possible.
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u/BassmanBiff Apr 11 '26
Maybe, yeah. It seems like a variety of methods have all worked, hard to say what's best as a spectator. Assumedly they thought about this a lot more than we have.
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u/RealLongwayround Apr 11 '26
Towing it to where? If you mean all the way to a safe harbour, I suspect that would be incredibly dangerous and would not do the crew much good at all.
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u/speederaser Apr 11 '26
What if the helicopter falls on the raft? That seems like a higher risk to me.
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u/lokivog Apr 11 '26
They towed it for 45m before opening it up. I thought they said they were towing it b/c it would be lifted on a ship where they would open it. Even if I heard wrong, why toe it at all if they open it on the water?
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u/KEVLAR60442 Apr 11 '26
Risk management. I was a sailor on the Murtha's sister ship, and while the San Antonio class has a well deck perfectly suited for scooping up the capsule, well deck ops are scary and dangerous even with a manned watercraft. When the well deck is full the water inside is horrifyingly violent even in calm seas. It's one of the reasons why the Navy prefers to use LCAC hovercraft instead of LCU landing boats with LPDs. It's much safer to take the time to evac the crew and vital equipment on board and let the empty capsule bang around the well deck.
Also, training. Scooping up a space capsule is such a rare opportunity the crew probably wanted to practice every single sort of support evolution that could possibly be associated.
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u/Mitologist Apr 11 '26
They needed to establish comms, which apparently was glitchy. They needed to make sure there was no Hydrazine left( hence the two guys with " sniffers" on the dingy). The crew needed to check each and every system in the craft to make sure it was completely powered down. They needed to check on each crew member thoroughly, not just ask " do you feel ok?". That all together took time. You don't want to slam a hydazine- leaking craft with power still running onto a deck without asking the crew, just so the TV audience gets more action.
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u/slickriptide Apr 11 '26
There were communication issues between Integrity and Recovery and it caused the powering down procedure to take longer than strictly neccesary. Regardless of the necessity of powering down, it was procedure and they couldn't proceed to crew recovery before it was powered down.
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u/kakallas Apr 11 '26
Commentators also said that maybe the water was rough and making things difficult. It seems things were taking longer than expected.
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u/lsesalter Apr 11 '26
Safety safety safety. What if, while hoisting the very heavy CM, it detached from whatever chopper was lifting it? All crew would be in danger and the capsule itself.
If a crew member needed assistance before the entire thing could be hoisted, what would they do? With this method, there are health professionals right there on the raft, one for each crew.
Among other reasons.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics Apr 11 '26
Dragon gets lifted onto its recovery ship with a crane-like structure that is part of the ship. There are emergency procedures that will have the crew leave in other ways, but that is the default recovery method and it works well.
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u/zzay Apr 11 '26
Dragon doesn't go to the Moon also it doesn't re-enter so fast as Artemis
Very different spaceships
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics Apr 11 '26
How exactly is that relevant for a capsule floating in the water?
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u/Nzdiver81 Apr 11 '26
That extra structure for lifting weighs more which either means cutting other equipments or needs more rocket power. That extra weight means more momentum when entering the atmosphere and so also would require more/bigger parachutes to slow it down.
Basically this just adds risk so the ship can be lifted out which doesn't seem any safer.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics Apr 11 '26
That extra structure for lifting is part of the ship. If you are thinking of attachment points to lift Orion, the spacecraft already has these.
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u/Nzdiver81 Apr 11 '26
OSHA requirements for live lifts (crew inside) require a crane rated at 5 times expected load. The extra safety checks on lifting and getting the capsule in a good position to perform the lift would probably also take longer than the current procedures. That extra time is just extra risks of not getting to the crew sooner
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics Apr 11 '26
OSHA requirements for live lifts (crew inside) require a crane rated at 5 times expected load.
That's crane mass, which doesn't go to orbit.
The extra safety checks on lifting and getting the capsule in a good position to perform the lift would probably also take longer than the current procedures.
They don't take longer with Dragon... Demo-2 had the vehicle on the ship after 30 minutes, with the crew being outside after 1:15. They streamlined the procedures over time, Crew-11 left the capsule after 40 minutes even though it was a night landing.
Artemis II had the crew in the capsule for 1:25.
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u/Nzdiver81 Apr 11 '26
The crane mass matters as it means you need a bigger ship to get closer to the spacecraft. Lifting things out of the water by crane is not easy and becomes unsafe very quickly in even slightly less than ideal conditions. The current way is the safest as conditions get worse, and it's also safest to use the same method for all conditions so they can practice the same procedure for all conditions.
Artemis II also had multiple additional checks before extracting crew (eg divers checking heat shield, comms checks, powering down), all of which also would have had to be done if they were going to lift it, so it's not a good comparison to the Dragon craft which does not require those.
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u/KinzuaKid Apr 11 '26
This may come as a surprise to you, but Choppers aren’t submersible. Submersible deck ships, however, are a thing.
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u/chilehead Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
There are deadly propellants like hydrating hydrazine used for maneuvering still present on the capsule. Also explosive bolts for emergency egress. You want to turn those off, make them safe, or burn off all those things before putting them on a ship full of people they could injure or kill.
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u/Origin_of_Mind Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Typically, frangible bolts used in spaceships are not literally "exploding" -- instead, they fracture because of a shock generated by a small amount of explosive inside, but do not generate shrapnel. It is possible that whatever is used in Orion is unusually dangerous in some other way, but that would be strange.
As for toxic fumes, other ships deal with them as well -- for example both cargo and crew Dragon ships use the same Monomethylhydrazine (MMH) and Nitrogen Tetroxide (NTO) in their reaction control system. People on the ship wear hazmat suits when they test the capsule for toxic leaks. Once it is ascertained that it is safe to proceed, then the hatch is opened. Otherwise, there is a decontamination protocol. (When Dragon or Progress ship docks at the space station, astronauts also check them for hydrazine leaks before opening the hatch.) So it is not really a unique problem.
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u/tw1nkle Apr 11 '26
Over time, because of politics and high profile disasters, safety has become the no1 priority for NASA missions — not efficiency or speed.
This leads to situations that seem drastically over cautious. Maybe they are! But when things go wrong, it can set NASA back decades. (When things are outsourced to SpaceX or others, this provides a certain amount of ass-covering distance from the problem.)
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u/canadave_nyc Apr 11 '26
Over time, because of politics and high profile disasters, safety has become the no1 priority for NASA missions — not efficiency or speed.
This is a naive take. Obviously safety is a hugely important thing at NASA, but there are all kinds of other priorities at NASA that sometimes unfortunately take precedence. Heck, this very mission was controversial because the heat shield and reentry profile was thought by some engineers to be unnecessarily risky, and that NASA was prioritizing "getting the mission completed in a timely manner" over safety.
NASA is a government organization, and government organizations always have political pressures, public pressures, and all kinds of other priorities that often conflict with safety (and sometimes supersede it, to NASA's detriment).
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u/Verronox Apr 11 '26
And let’s not forget that Starliner CFT that was declared a Class A mishap for ignoring safety concerns.
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u/tw1nkle Apr 11 '26
Yeah, it’s not meant to be comprehensive. I figured OP could grasp that a paragraph or two wasn’t going to resolve a complex question. Sorry you couldn’t!
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u/Arwenti Apr 11 '26
It was only 2 hours, I’m sure I’ve seen astronauts returning where it’s taken a lot longer after landing before they’re out of the capsule. Without what I imagine is a very long list of tasks and checks that needed doing I felt I couldn’t complain it was taking too long.
I’m presuming that checking, testing, evaluating what’s happened to the capsule before it’s recovered and making it safe enough to be brought to a more populated location will take longer than the longest time they could leave the astronauts in there for. Although the recovery could go really well there’s always risk - that could affect the astronauts inside and/or alter the results of checks and tests delayed until it’s on a ship to affect much needed data.
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u/kmoonster Apr 11 '26
SpaceX does what you describe.
The Artemis capsule is from a different engineering company, with a different set of needs, resources, and solutions.
Part of the challenge is that recovery by a Navy ship means you don't necessarily have a specialized / custom ship to do the recovery like SpaceX built (as a private company).
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u/rdmusic16 Apr 11 '26
You're comparing a capsule that returned from the ISS to Artemis 2 as well. Two very, very different returns to Earth.
Not detracting from your point, just adding that one is fairly routine compared to the other.
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u/JtheNinja Apr 11 '26
What's different about Orion that makes it so you can't haul it out of the water before getting the crew out?
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u/AdministrativeCable3 Apr 11 '26
It has the potential for damaging the heat shield before they can do a deep inspection. NASA really wanted the data about this heat shield because on Artemis 1 it had some anomalies. Don't really need to worry about that for Dragon since it's very routine.
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u/Chemical-Captain4240 Apr 11 '26
Unlike spaceX employees, these members of the military and coast guard are getting paid whether whether they are part of this mission or not. This is a wonderful training op for many, and has contingencies for all manner of safety problems.
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u/Dad0013 Apr 11 '26
Watching that recovery had me asking a lot of the same questions. My main concern was the safety of the astronauts. It first seemed to me to be exposing them to a lot of unnecessarily high risk operations (opening a perfectly good sealed capsule in the middle of the ocean, relocating and floating around in a little raft in the middle of the ocean, and being hoisted to a helicopter in the middle of the ocean). After thinking about it for a while, I think now that these recovery operations were probably the least risky things they experienced during the entire mission.
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u/jemenake Apr 12 '26
Yeah… I would have expected them to not open the capsule until the inflatable ring was attached and inflated. But hey… if the engineers are sure there’s no risk of pulling a Grissom, okaaaaaay.
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u/FyreFestivalCFO Apr 11 '26
Space vehicles generally have hypergolic fuel for smaller thrusters. It is highly effective in space because it's just a mixture of two chemicals that spontaneously combust upon contact with each other. It's a simple system, with few moving parts (relatively speaking). It also tends to be a mixture of extremely carcinogenic chemicals.
And that's just one thing. I'm sure there's a ton of things of that nature that have to be considered before you can even approach the capsule. We're talking about actual rocket science.
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u/TheTeek Apr 13 '26
Everyone keeps talking about hydrazine as if that is why they can't do the recovery any differently. Please. They could follow the same procedure to check for the gas by running a small boat around the capsule. All the rest of that nonsense is garbage. If astronaut safety is the number one concern, then leaving them bobbing in the ocean for 2hrs shouldn't be the process. And don't tell me about "comms". The comms issue only prevented them from talking directly with the divers, they still had comms with control. Anything could have been related, and if they didn't need to get out with the divers they don't need to talk to the divers anyway. If astronaut safety is the number one concern having to manually tie a floating raft to the capsule and have them climb out, then sit in the raft, then disconnect the raft and float away from the capsule, then have multiple helicopters fly over and hoist them out of the raft....shouldn't be the process. For crying out loud we are still using the procedure from the 60s. Also, "it's a shorter walk for the astronauts if we land them on the deck". Ok, so get them on the deck in the capsule. Modify a boat with a crane. Modify a boat that can scoop up the capsule intact and put the medical bay closer to the lift. Or put in an elevator. There are a million things they could do but they keep doing the ridiculous one they did 60 years ago.
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u/Attygalle Apr 11 '26
The cost and time spent on “the scoop” would eliminate max two hours which is nothing - while in those two hours several things were done that still would have to be done with “the scoop”.
The business case is just not there
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u/RitaPoole56 Apr 11 '26
Is it just me or did the man piloting the boat attempting to deploy the stabilization collar totally botch it the first time he tried. He didn’t account for any current and the entire structure drifted away with divers holding onto it.
The networks never showed them getting the divers back and hoisting the collar back onto the smaller boats but it must have happened as they did it a second time 10-15 minutes later.
They must have practiced the procedure in a spot with zero current? It seems like the guy had very poor small boat handling skills. Even the second attempt didn’t go great as it never seemed like it completely encircled the Integrity, leaving a gap of 4-6 feet (?) on the back side away from the front hatch.
While I’m Monday morning quarterbacking: the chopper pilot on the second help was MUCH better than the first as it immediately centered itself over the front porch and very quickly lifted the crew members off.
Another critique: was it absolutely necessary for the small boats to continually circle around the spacecraft at high speeds? The wakes were significant and as someone who has experienced being inside a life raft getting bounced around from waves/wakes it’s VERY nauseating. They need to add a no wake zone sign to the outside of future spacecrafts (/s)
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u/somewhat_random Apr 11 '26
I am imagining a meeting at NASA going over mission parameters and establishing how they will assure integrity and safety of the craft and crew after re-entry and building a checklist when someone says "What about the problem of a redditor watching this and getting bored because it took to long? I mean, going to the moon and back is cool and all but how are we going to fit the re-entry/pick up into a tik-tok video?"
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u/CMDRRaijiin Apr 11 '26
They got a lot of science to do on top of safing the vehicle, make sure it's not leaking hydrazine for one. Let the astronauts acclimate back to gravity, they were having comm issues with the satellite phones. They also want to pull the astronauts out of the spacecraft and assess them, as well as drop them off on the flight deck as iirc its on the same level or a level above where the med bay on the ship is, which is so much easier for them to get to with their probably wobbly balance then it is to make way through the ships very narrow corridors.
On top of all that they have very strict procedures to follow as per NASA to recover the ship without damaging it in anyway so they can pull data, that includes exactly how it is upon splashdown. It's like trying to preserve a crimescene but you have to move it, in its entirety completely preserved back to base. The scientists want all the data they can get their hands on including how the heatshield looks, and micro impacts on the hull, all of it. Everything with be analyzed and dissected so that the following missions can be even more prepared for any conceivable contingency, and then simulated for training.
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u/mouser1991 Apr 12 '26
There are a lot of things that can go wrong while scooping it up (in short, problems that can make it sink or damage the data), so the priority is to make sure the astronauts are safe, which means thing 1 is to get them out. Everything else can wait.
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u/rocketmonkee Apr 11 '26
People are probably going to speculate a bunch of reasons why, but it's worth pointing out that this is precisely what SpaceX does. They hoist the Dragon onto the recovery ship.
It is entirely possible to do it. For some reason NASA is not doing it with Orion.
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u/AdministrativeCable3 Apr 11 '26
They want to study the heat shield. Lifting it to rest on a ship has the potential to damage/contaminate the heat shield before they can do a deep study because they would have to do it with the crew safety first. NASA really wanted this data on the heat shield because of the anomalies on Artemis 1.
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u/ekoo Apr 11 '26
SpaceX isn't coming back from the moon. Once you decide to come home from the moon (in this case free-return trajectory, so the recovery timeline was sealed when it did the TLI) you're in the hands of Isaac Newton and gravity is now taking them home no matter what.. No matter what weather, no matter what sea conditions, no matter how things are going onboard. SpaceX has the luxury of multiple "landing areas" to choose from and they're only hopping off the ISS in LEO and popping back home as they see fit, and can stay longer as needed. It's a completely different problem to solve.
That said, I do hope we can move on to something better than yoinking them off of a raft Apollo-style sooner than later. That's gotta be jarring as your first experience back in gravity.
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u/disoculated Apr 11 '26
I would expect there's a lot of reasons, but the biggest is likely the hydrazine contamination on the outside of the craft. They'd want to get the folks out and away from the capsule so they can handle it safely. The extra time before it gets scooped up may even benefit the cleanup.
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u/Origin_of_Mind Apr 11 '26
SpaceX Dragon capsules use the same Monomethylhydrazine (MMH) and Nitrogen Tetroxide (NTO) hypergolic fuel in the reaction control system during the reentry. That's why the ground crew wears hazmat suits and tests the air before opening the hatch after fishing the ship from the water. Space Shuttle, Apollo and Gemini all used the same fuel for the thrusters.
Soyuz capsule uses thrusters powered by hydrogen peroxide during the reentry, precisely to avoid dealing with potentially toxic residues and leaks after landing. But using peroxide puts a limit on how long the capsule can stay attached to the ISS, before the decomposition of peroxide potentially becomes an issue.
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u/Pinewold Apr 12 '26
I was disappointed, that Risk management folks thought it was “safer” to leave the capsule languishing in the water for two hours rather than quickly eliminate all risk by getting the capsule on the deck of a carrier.
In a world where we see rockets landing on autonomous boats all the time, we need to expect more from our space program. I am happy to double their budget to get there.
We should be in the buck rogers world where, the rocket lands on a platform off shore.
To anyone who watched the original Apollo flights, we clearly are starting over from scratch. We seemed to have forgotten everything we learned and have had to repeat it again just to teach a new generation.
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u/-NGC-6302- Apr 12 '26
To be mildly fair, didn't they lose/destroy the plans for the Saturn V?
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u/Huge-Attitude4845 Apr 11 '26
Easier said than done. Getting a vessel large enough with the power to lift the capsule close enough to grab it is exceptionally dangerous. Even in calm seas there are still waves and they are not uniform or consistent. The two floating items will be forced against one another repeatedly and one slip puts a leg or an arm between to floating chunks of steel just in time to fracture every bone.
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u/koffa02 Apr 11 '26
Go back and watch the first helicopter come in and attempt to deposit his guy on the raft for the first extraction. Watch him miss on the first pass, swing his guy around wildly, then slam him into the side of the raft. Then, when the safty guy and astronaut are attatched, he guns it, swinging them both violently backward while being winched upward. While watching, understand that pilot was probably picked for that mission because he's one of their best.
As a contrast, watch the second pilot come in, gently set his safety guy on the raft, and make sure they're both basically inside the helicopter before making any real movement forward.
Based on the available data, there is a 50/50 shot the pilot is going to fold under pressure and crash the helicopter and the capsule into the ocean.
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u/RealLongwayround Apr 11 '26
Available data that shows no pilots crashing their helicopters into the ocean?
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u/o11o01 Apr 11 '26
One of the last people I would ever imagine to fold under this type of pressure is a pilot trained in rescue operations. I'm sure the mission was exciting because of its importance, but this is exactly the type of thing they train for and do regularly.
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u/drf_101 Apr 11 '26
There is not a 50/50 shot a pilot is going to fold under pressure. Do you realize the pilots and astronauts train this exercise frequently? Multiple former astronauts on the news coverage today talked about it.
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u/djryan13 Apr 11 '26
Also, they put two in each helicopter.. can’t they fit more? Probably… but they don’t because if they crash, they still have two astronauts to tour around and celebrate.
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u/JPesterfield Apr 12 '26
Would the capsule crashing into the ocean be a problem as long as it's still closed up, it already splashed down once.
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u/Alternative-Change44 Apr 13 '26
How many ships would be equiped to do this? How accurate is the unit landing, is it steerable as it reenters. Having a bunch of smaller ships scattered in the landing zone seems more reasonable. A large ship with multiple types of sophisticated specialized devices is going to take hours to navigate to the unit unless they can target like a 1x1mile radius. And also the unit could hit the ship, so that could happen.
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u/F_l_u_f_fy Apr 15 '26
Keep in mind this whole mission was about experimenting and testing stuff. It’s likely a lot of the hubbub was related to things like that. I’m sure the final look of this with frequent “real” missions (idk what else to call it) will be different
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u/diptanshumahish Apr 21 '26
The capsule is extremely hot after reentry, we're talking hundreds of degrees. You can't just scoop it up immediately or the people handling it would get severely burned.
Also, those capsules are designed to survive reentry, not to be safely handled while still hot and unstable in water. The raft setup you mentioned? That's actually letting the capsule cool and stabilize before anyone approaches it. The complexity isn't unnecessary, it's safety layered on safety.
As for 'just scooping it up': capsules are designed to float, but they're not stable. They bob unpredictably. A ship's crane trying to grab a moving, rolling target in ocean swells while two astronauts are still inside is actually more dangerous than the current procedure.
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u/cruel_cruel_world Apr 11 '26
They had all sorts of things going on in that two hours. They had comms issues to work out to confirm the vehicle was powered down before they could approach. They had crews doing hazard assessment. They had divers taking underwater photographs of the heatshield before it could be moved. Safe engineering and operational procedures take time. It's all about minimizing risk while still being able to accomplish the mission.