• Question: how do you recover the space ship once landed in water.

    Asked by Rowhyn to Vinita, Kirsty, Col Op, Charlie 🚀, Andrea on 15 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Kirsty Lindsay

      Kirsty Lindsay answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      With a boat and some helicopter- like the Apollo capsules.
      When a spacecraft land on water it’s called ‘splashdown’

    • Photo: Andrea Boyd

      Andrea Boyd answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      We don’t land in water for the ISS flights – they launch and land from remote sites in Kazakhstan always with a Soyuz rocket and Soyuz Descent Module. The launchsite has an airport nearby for normal planes and you drive to the launchpad in cars but the landing site can be anywhere in the desert – We go out to pick them up with several helicopters. However a couple of the cargo vehicles land in water and we recover them with a ship. In the old days for human landings in water you’d have ships and helicopters.

      Here is the best video ever made showing real life human landings from the International Space Station. It will be like this for Tim tomorrow: http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2013/11/Soyuz_undocking_reentry_and_landing_explained

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