Sea Trials

摘要

When it comes to being rescued after splashdown, astronauts are fussy. "The crew doesn't like it if you don't pick them up," jokes Don Pearson, a project manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.rnThat's why parajumpers from Air Force Special Operations Command gathered around a 26-foot-deep pond at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on a cold day last March. They practiced attaching a flotation collar and sea anchor to a 17,000-pound full-scale model of the Orion crew capsule, which has an interior volume nearly twice that of the Apollo capsule.