Soft landing? | Mission Planning Workgroup | Forum

According to the Wikipedia article on project Gemini:

The original intention was for Gemini to land on solid ground instead of at sea, using a paraglider rather than a parachute, and for the crew to be seated upright controlling the forward motion of the craft before its landing.

There's an illustration here.  This would kind of have made Gemini a little like a miniature space shuttle.  I find this idea kind of attractive for a few reasons:

• Landing on solid ground feels a little safer and a lot easier to me than a splashdown.  With a splashdown, we'd need either a large boat equipped with a crane or a heavy lifting helicopter to retrieve the craft – these would both be expensive.  Also, we'd need to get to the splashdown location quickly or risk a drowned astronaut.  If anything went wrong during landing, drowning would be a serious risk.  In contrast, recovery on land would require only a moderate sized truck for recovery, we could take hours to find the landing site if there was a tracking problem with minimal risk to the astronaut (the craft itself would provide ample protection from the elements, wildlife, etc), and a broken limb during a rough landing would hurt but not cause drowning.
• The softer the landing, the more of the craft we can reuse.  I know I've mentioned this before and it's met with some skepticism, but if it is at all possible I would love for our craft to be reusable, to save on cost.  Obviously, heat shielding would need to be refurbished or replaced, but I suspect just about everything else should survive the mission, with the possible exception of the main structure of the craft.  I feel like a soft landing on solid ground would be gentler on this than a splashdown.

Thoughts?

I found a photo of the proposed Gemini paraglider system.  The use of actual landing carriage has me a little confused, everything else I have read has said the system would land on skis, which I presume would take up a lot less space inside the capsule.  That said, the Gemini capsule in this photo is only a model, not a genuine capsule – perhaps they just put it on wheels for convenience.

The wing looks here like it has a rigid internal structure, but everything I've read says that it is actually inflatable.  I am assuming that before deployment it is packed down into the capsule taking up perhaps just a little more space than a regular parachute.  I have read that in the event of a paraglider failure, a parachute landing was still possible, but I don't know if this means there was a regular parachute in the capsule or, since Gemini featured ejection seats just like a jet fighter, it means the crew used parachutes while the capsule just crashed.  Ejection seats sound not-simple to me so I'd be inclined to give them a miss, but I guess that depends on how reliable the paragliding system is.  If it is more prone to failure than a simple parachute landing it seems a little unfair to use it if the crew will not have an alternative.

I guess landing in a lake would minimise some of the issues associated with an ocean landing.  There may be environmental issues to consider.  I suppose all the really nasty chemicals would be attached to our propulsion system which would simply burn up, but I don't know if the ablative heat shielding will produce anything unpleasant while it burns away.  Also if people use those lakes for boating or fishing or the like regularly we might get in trouble for just dropping on in.  It's well worth considering, though.