SpaceX - landing a crewed Dragon (video)

[Dr Mordrid]

The gauntlet is down as to who's going to fly US astronauts.

Click here to view the video (landing animation starts @ 3:30)

Update....(worth reading)

2nd post shows how a manned Dragon will land. Robert Heinlein would approve

Taking the Next Step

Commercial Crew Development Round 2

January 17th, 2011

December 8th 2010 marked an incredible accomplishment for SpaceX. As most of you know, we became the first commercial company to successfully recover a spacecraft from Earth orbit. This is a feat previously only accomplished by six other nations/government agencies, and was made possible only through our ongoing partnership with NASA.

While the flight was a significant technical achievement for SpaceX as a company, it was probably most significant for the American taxpayer. The United States has an urgent, critical need for commercial human spaceflight. After the Space Shuttle retires next year, NASA will be totally dependent on the Russian Soyuz to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station for a price of over $50 million per seat.

The December 8 COTS Demo 1 flight demonstrated SpaceX is prepared to meet this need—and at less than half the cost.

We believe the now flight-proven Falcon 9 and Dragon architecture is the safest path to crew transportation capability. Both vehicles were designed from the beginning to transport astronauts. The cargo version of the Dragon spacecraft will be capable of carrying crew with only three key modifications: a launch abort system, environmental controls and seats.
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[Dr Mordrid]

How a crew Dragon will land.

Note the dual shock cones per engine cluster. This shows that each cluster will have 2 escape/landing engines for redundancy. Their thrust not being vertical would result in an engine failure only resulting in a correctable horizontal movement instead of destabilizing the entire spacecraft.

Fact is, this arrangement could probably lose 2 or more landing engines and still safely touch down.

It also appears that the landing gear will follow KISS - simple extension legs that deploy out of the heat shield area. This indicates some heat shield components are sacrificial. Interestingly, a view of the heat shield in an earlier update showed 4 round sections arranged in the proper pattern.

SpaceX has come up with a very, very logical design that makes even the launch escape system reusable and the spacecraft capable of touching down on land or at sea. Wow....













Existing heat shield features on Dragon - landing gear deployment panels?