The RRS used to use a 5" diameter foam filled GRP nosecone to recover rocket mail covers, which worked fine for a fall from about 2500 feet. On a couple of occasions the rocket failed to separate from the mail package and drove into the packed envelopes, which allowed the damaged ones to be sold at a premium. The packed envelopes seemed to stop the rocket in about one foot, as I recall. Foam or envelopes; both seem to work.... Bill Sent from my iPhone On Nov 17, 2013, at 11:27, Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, 17 Nov 2013 johndom@xxxxxxxxx wrote: >> As chutes often fail I wonder if it would be possible to design an >> impact resistant payload bay, just in case. OTOH, none of the (lunar) >> Ranger impact probes made it. Bad omen? > > Not really -- none of the Ranger hard-landers got a chance to try. > ("Impact probe" is a bit of a misnomer -- the Ranger landers had solid > retros that decelerated them to fairly low velocity before impact.) > > Only Rangers 3-5 carried the hard-lander. Ranger 3 missed the Moon due to > launcher misbehavior, and Rangers 4 and 5 had major electronics failures > in the main spacecraft that prevented both the midcourse correction and > the lander deployment. Rangers 6-9 carried cameras only. > > Ranger 10 was going to make the next hard-lander attempt, but it and its > successors were canceled -- Ranger had hit so many problems and delays > that by the time Ranger 9 flew, Surveyor 1 was almost ready to attempt > the first controlled soft landing, so further attempts with the Ranger > hard-lander seemed pointless. > > Henry Spencer > henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > (hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) > (regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx) > >