• Question: When your in space and you want to go into the earth how could you go in with a spaceship because the earth must really hard and rocky to go back in?

    Asked by 10zayyour1 to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Mario Campanelli

      Mario Campanelli answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      in the beginning, astronauts used to be thrown into oceans; lately, they were landing with a space shuttle as they would do with a normal plane

    • Photo: Clare Burrage

      Clare Burrage answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      You have to make sure you slow down on the way back towards the Earth! The space shuttle did this by firing it’s engines in the opposite direction to slow the shuttle down as it approached the Earth.

    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Yup. Either land in something squidgy like the ocean but your going so fast it’s still pretty hard, or break somehow. Usefully air resistance helps with teh braking naturally but you need to use engines firing the wrong way to slow you right down to land in a shuttle.

Comments

  • Zaynah Younis commented on :

    I kinda get what you mean but how do you actually go in? Thanks.

    • Photo: Ezzy

      Ezzy commented on :

      Oh you mean tunnel down? Well you wouldn’t need a space ship, you’d need something else. Spaceships are designed to not explode in a vacuum, if your tunneling you need something that can withstand the pressure of the earth. There’s also the problem that once you get to a certain depth down (about 12 miles I think) you get past the earth’s crust and end up in the magma at the earth’s core so you’d have to deal with the heat as well.