"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...

wrote:

"In 1961, an American astronaut reached space for the first time and
soared
through the heavens in a gumdrop-shaped capsule.

Since then, people have flown to the moon, created space planes and
designed
rockets that return to Earth for precision landings. But when astronauts
lift off
next year from U.S. soil for the first time in six years, their vehicle of
choice
will be another capsule."

See:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...htmlstory.html




How do the benefits of capsules and spaceplanes compare?


Capsules have lower dry mass for the cargo they carry, since you're
not carrying along all that lifting structure. I was rather
disappointed to see SpaceX back away from a powered landing on land
for the Dragon V2, since that would have addressed one of the
advantages of spaceplanes in that they don't require 'recovery forces'
to fish them out of the water. Small spaceplanes tend to be more
'reusable' than capsules. However, the fiasco that was the Space
Shuttle backed everyone away from the idea of spaceplanes.



My understanding is that NASA is the one insisting on a water landing for
Dragon V2, but SpaceX for its own missions still plans to ultimately do land
landings.

I expect we'll eventually see us move back towards small spaceplans/lifting
body designs in a few decades, but it'll take some time.


--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net
IT Disaster Response -
https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Resp...dp/1484221834/