From Chutes to Wings: Coming Home from Space
Imagine for a moment that you have just returned from space in a spacecraft so small that you literally have to be squeezed into the opening hatch to enter it. You are on a nearly ballistic reentry, falling into the atmosphere faster than a bullet out of gun. Lying on your back, the heat shield, which will keep you from being incinerated, is only a few inches from your skin. After a harrowing adventure into space, in basically a rudimentary capsule, the astronaut’s life depended on a parachute properly releasing and unfolding. This was the fate of the first men who entered space.
Until the Space Shuttle became America’s ticket into space in 1981, the only way Americans could safely finish their stay in space was by way of parachute. Like any mechanism, the parachutes used to soften the landing of a spacecraft were sometimes apt to fail. Thankfully not one manned Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo spacecraft had a parachute failure that resulted in injury.
The parachutes used to safely return men from space were in their infancy during the Mercury program. It was a dangerous system. The Mercury and Gemini spacecraft were dependent on one main parachute (a smaller drogue chute was used also at high altitudes before the main). If the main failed to deploy it would be fatal for the occupants. The Apollo spacecraft, because of its weight, had three massive chutes. This allowed the craft to be slightly redundant. If one of the parachutes failed, the astronauts would be in for a strong jolt, but they would survive (assuming they landed on water, and not on land). In fact, this is precisely what happened on Apollo 15. After a triumphant mission to the lunar landscape of Hadley Rille, one main parachute quickly folded into a fluttering mess of cloth and line. Luckily, the crew landed safely. Unfortunately, most of the ground crew and public watching had to be resuscitated.
The Russians were not so lucky. Since people first began launching into space there has been only one tragic death linked to parachutes used after reentry. In 1967, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died when his Voskhod 1 capsule slammed into the Earth at over 300 m.p.h. While there are many theories as to how this disaster occurred, one possible cause was clear: the parachute attached to Komarov’s capsule was tangled and torn. He is the only fatality, in both Russia and America, as a result of a parachute failure on a spacecraft.
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