** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

The Shenzhou 9 spacecraft docked with the Tiangong 1 laboratory module at 07:08 BST. Start at 06:00:

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Ticks his checklist at 08:00 :D

Commander Jing Haipeng and Liu Yang will enter the Tiangong 1 module at 10:22 BST.
 
PermaBanned said:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/diy-capsule-drop-test-evaluations/

kPMOC.jpg

Now while this doesn't seem to be a particularly ideal scenario, i guess it's workable. You just wouldn't want to stay there for a long time ;)
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The hatches are underwater - even if the crew were able to force them open against the pressure differential, the capsule would start flooding. It's very likely this would cause the astronauts to drown.

Here is what happens when a space capsule starts taking on water even with the capsule itself oriented correctly. The hatch blew prematurely, and the lone pilot nearly drowned since his space suit made swimming difficult.

It would be salvageable if the rescue ship was able to re-orient the capsule in the water or lift it out. But those hatches are designed to stop air going out, not to stop water coming in. It's a bit of a hairy situation.
 
I believe the capsule was designed to exist in both Stable I and Stable II situations. Although since Stable II is obviously a lot less desirable they have a system of uprighting bags which can flip the capsule over, only they didn't completely inflate (probably) due to a short. They're working on it. As tests go, i'm pretty sure they found out what they needed to find out.

The difference between this an Mercury is that this doesn't have an explosive hatch. For simplicity's sake they basically bolted on the hatch as many times as they could. In fact, i think it can only be opened from the outside. This is liable to change in future iterations though (as in, the iterations that might eventually carry a person). You can read up on the hatch design, it was largely crowd sourced. Come to think of it, if you have a legitimate concern/suggestions for improvement then post them in the comments, Kristian often replies.
 
PermaBanned said:
I believe the capsule was designed to exist in both Stable I and Stable II situations. Although since Stable II is obviously a lot less desirable they have a system of uprighting bags which can flip the capsule over, only they didn't completely inflate (probably) due to a short. They're working on it. As tests go, i'm pretty sure they found out what they needed to find out.

The difference between this an Mercury is that this doesn't have an explosive hatch. For simplicity's sake they basically bolted on the hatch as many times as they could. In fact, i think it can only be opened from the outside. This is liable to change in future iterations though (as in, the iterations that might eventually carry a person). You can read up on the hatch design, it was largely crowd sourced. Come to think of it, if you have a legitimate concern/suggestions for improvement then post them in the comments, Kristian often replies.
Click to expand...

Well yes, NASA took the explosive hatch feature out of future spacecraft after that incident. It's a rather cruel twist of fate that the astronaut who survived the incident of the hatch opening too easily, was incinerated in Apollo 1 because the hatch wouldn't open.

So yeah, you have to be careful about these things.
 
The Atlas 5 with NROL-38 is on its way:

atlas51.jpg

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atlas53.jpg

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