Talk:Splashdown

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: both pages moved. I note that this is in part reversing a previous and apparently undiscussed move, and that technically it should have been a multi-move, but the bold part of this move (the moving of the DAB) doesn't require any admin powers. Andrewa (talk) 13:16, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Splashdown (spacecraft landing) → Splashdown – primary, original and most notable by far usage of the term. Present Splashdown namespace should be made a disambiguation. Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 06:22, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Easy and obvious support; come on, am I missing something? Red Slash 16:48, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Support, primary topic by all measures. bd2412  T 20:27, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Choice of location
Out of curiosity, does anyone know why the locations for say, the U.S. program, were spread all over the planet, rather than always being in the same place for cheaper recovery? -- Beland (talk) 21:48, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * For lunar missions, latitude was mainly determined by the return trajectory (from the Moon), while longitude was mainly a function of travel time and desired lighting conditions at the landing site. In order to have as much daylight available as possible, it was preferred to have the splashdown happen in the morning (local time). Maybe even more important, the splashdown spot was also influenced by the location of the landing site on the Moon (sic!) because the landing on the Moon had to take place under certain lighting conditions, and the return to Earth occurred so-and-so many days after the lunar landing. That is, Earth, Moon, and Sun were in a particular constellation, relative to each other, which means that the Apollo spacecraft would typically approach the Earth from its dark side, flying eastwards, into daylight. Lunar returns could also have splashed down in the Atlantic, but the Pacific Ocean has less traffic and offers more freedom in terms of stretching or shortening the re-entry path.
 * For orbital missions, as you can see from the map, the recovery zone was typically located in the North Atlantic, east of Florida, and without much variation. Re-entry was timed in such a way that the spacecraft could be monitored via Hawaii, prior to the deorbit burn, and then would pass over U.S. territory, where there was continuous contact with ground stations until radio blackout. The only exceptions were "Sigma 7" (the mission duration of six orbits probably did not offer a convenient recovery zone in the North Atlantic), Gemini 8 (which suffered an emergency and thus had to pick the next available backup recovery zone), and the four Skylab and ASTP missions (maybe due to the greater inclination of their orbital plane relative to the equator), which all splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. --Armchairastronaut (talk) 05:18, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
 * rephrased "return path" to "re-entry path". --Armchairastronaut (talk) 05:21, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Dead links and unit use

 * I was referring to this pages sources to answer a Science ref desk (wp:RD/S) query,, about "miss distances" from predicted landing point and found that some sources seem to be unavailable in their original PDF format, though Google cached HTML version are available' Others, the Apollo program, i.e. for the Apollo 16 seem to have been moved and are at new URLS.
 * Secondly, some distances are wrong, i.e. the source for the Apollo 16 says "3.0 n mi from the target point" (5.56 km; 3.45 miles) not the 0.55 km (0.34 miles) in the table, and
 * Distances are given in kilometres while the originals are in Nautical miles (n mi). Suggest that distances be given in the original nautical miles, miles and kilometres per WP:Globalise.
 * Tables could be made sortable --220  of  Borg 10:44, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Coordinate error
The following coordinate fixes are needed for

—95.112.13.230 (talk) 17:51, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
 * You haven't said which of the coordinates in the article are erroneous or how they're erroneous, and I, for one, am not going to check each one of the many sets of coordinates to try to identify errors. The coordinates all seem to be sourced to official NASA documents, so I think it's your responsibility to provide a clearer explanation if you think something is wrong. Please do so below. 14:11, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I disagree about using nautical miles as units. Suppose the table will be extended in the future. Russian, European, and Chinese sources are likely to publish their data in the metric system (which should, by the way, also be applied in the UK and the US). However, the wrong data should definitely be corrected. Indeed Apollo 16 data in this table are not consistent with the source that's quoted. --Armchairastronaut (talk) 05:26, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just modified one external link on Splashdown. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive http://www.webcitation.org/6973otfgk?url=http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/05/31/history-is-made-as-dragon-splashes-down-safely-in-the-pacific/ to http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/05/31/history-is-made-as-dragon-splashes-down-safely-in-the-pacific/

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External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Splashdown. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110927021949/https://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Alpha&Alias=Zond+05&Letter=Z&Display=ReadMore to https://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Alpha&Alias=Zond+05&Letter=Z&Display=ReadMore

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External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Splashdown. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120414220743/http://www.videocosmos.com/soyuz23.shtm to http://www.videocosmos.com/soyuz23.shtm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110927021728/https://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Chron&MCode=Zond_08&StartYear=1970&EndYear=1979&Display=ReadMore to https://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Chron&MCode=Zond_08&StartYear=1970&EndYear=1979&Display=ReadMore

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Splashdown in fiction?
Should we add a "Splashdown in fiction" section, namely referring to Gravity (2013 film)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:C22:B438:BA00:405F:B791:2EEF:39E (talk) 18:06, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Unclear wording
The Missions section contains the text " All Gemini and Apollo flights (Apollos 7 to 17) used the former, while Mercury missions from Mercury 6 to Mercury 9, as well as all Skylab missions and Apollo-Soyuz used the latter, especially the Skylab flights as to preserve all medical data." I presume that former refers to some astronauts decide to be hoisted aboard a helicopter and latter to some decided to stay with the spacecraft and be lifted aboard ship via crane, but the intervening section in parenthesis makes this somewhat unclear. There is also inconsistency in the use of verb tense (used/decide). Also, how does the former preserve all medical data? Finally, the entire paragraph appears to be unsourced. Can any of the Wikipedians who contributed to the article shed any light? Regards Davidelit (Talk) 08:45, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Map doesn't match table
The points for Sigma 7, Skylab 2 and Skylab 4 on the map don't seem to match the table? November Aristotle (talk) 09:16, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Is it okay to add "usually" before "by parachute" in the description?
I just added "usually" before "by parachute". But on a second thought, it should have been better to talk about this before the change, and see different opinions and if it is still correct for the definition of splashdown.

I added "usually" because the SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 4 used landing burn rather than parachute before splashdown. Charles Dong (talk) 15:02, 6 June 2024 (UTC)