Personal cushion of air
Plans for Orion — the capsule that resembles the Apollo program’s spacecraft and was supposed to send humans to the moon by 2020 as part of NASA’s Constellation program — were changed in February when President Obama canceled Constellation, and then announced two months later that NASA would continue to develop Orion as an escape vehicle to be docked at the International Space Station for emergencies.While it appears that Orion will eventually take flight, NASA continues to struggle with one crucial aspect of its design: minimizing the violent impact that astronauts would experience during landing. Although NASA initially designed Orion’s crew seats to be mounted onto a stiff structure supported by shock absorbers — essentially the same technology used to cushion Apollo’s water landings — this 1,100-pound structure would be too heavy to cushion astronauts if the vehicle landed on land. Whereas the Apollo capsule was designed to land in...