Originally Posted by
happyjack
'Learning to fly R/C Helicopters back in the 70's having the machine topple over on landing was extremely common for all resulting in the end of your day's flying.
A very simple solution was to tie/tape two sticks about 1m long in a cross to the underside of the landing skids. With this you could still impact the ground with about 45 degrees of bank and a sideways drift and the thing just settled itself back on skids.
I am very surprised that there appears to have been little consideration for Odysseus not touching down perfectly? Simple solutions were available?
On a spacecraft, nothing is simple.
How big and heavy would those two sticks have to be to make this work on this spacecraft? How would they fit in the rocket fairing. They would have to be hinged or articulated in some way. A failsafe mechanism designed tested and built to extend them before landing. Then you would have to land in an area that was completely flat over an even wider area, one of those sticks hitting a big boulder during even a vertical descent would tip the craft over.
Rocket surgery is hard.