/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10758193
Source on the Demonstrator parachuting from orbit: http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/tm/2003/1/shagni.html
that's 1999-2003
they cut the program later due to various reasons, lack of money being the biggest one

>>9046169
They are all cancelled, no?
The only inflatable Earth reentry vehicle that was actually flown with real hardware was IRDT/Demonstrator. They tried to return the Fregat upper stage with it back in early 2000s (russian upper stages are compact and cost a lot, making them good targets for potential reuse). Despite losing it at the landing, they managed to receive telemetry after the reentry, indicating everything went OK. They decided to not continue the development due to poor landing accuracy (a common problem with these, they are poorly controlled and need a shallow reentry angle to extend the braking trajectory).

>>9046213
>you won't hit terminal velocity before you hit the ground
just FYI, these things were initially proposed for saving people from highrise fires, and IRDT was designed to descend slow enough to keep a fragile orbital stage from breaking (possibly requiring Soyuz-like retropropulsion at the final stage). They are parachutes.

>>8792504
What more puzzling to me is that they never continued the IRDT Fregat recovery experiment. Historically, their upper stages were compact, very high-tech and costly (i.e. well suited to reuse), and they somewhat successfully tested the inflatable recovery system for the Fregat upper stage in 2005.