Where do space shuttles land after they return to earth?

Answer 1

Kennedy Space Center in Florida is the preferred option. Edwards Airforce Base in California is the next site to be utilized if landing in Florida is unsafe, usually because of poor visibility or high winds. On one occasion only, a shuttle landed at White Sands in New Mexico, and this is the third option.Globally, there is a network of emergency landing sites, none of which have yet been used. See the link below.

Answer 2

This is a great question, there are a lot of techniques implemented which depend upon various factors such as the gravity of the planet, and the nature of the atmosphere. Because distances to the planets are great, spacecraft usually arrive at high speed and will need some kind of braking to prevent impact or burn damage. This can be provided in various ways, thrust by engines, high speed air braking by grazing the atmosphere, or a direct penetration of the atmosphere with a heat shield that slows through friction (and may be cooled by ablative surfaces); once entering the planet's atmosphere, passive deceleration techniques can be used, often parachutes. (The first attempt for a space vehicle to land on a planet was the Russian Venera 7 on Venus, whose parachute malfunctioned and the probe landed badly and was thought to have rolled onto its side.) Once slow enough, impact with the surface can be softened with brief retro-rockets, or with large gasbags such that the surface module package will bounce and come to a halt through friction. NASA designed landers for Martian surface rovers that used this technique, after which it's necessary to deflate and retract the gas bags; a tetrahedral shaped casing was designed such that regardless of which face of the unit was on the surface, the unfolding of the trifoliate design like three flower petals opening up would place the probe correctly on the "base" surface ready to drive-off the platform. One particularly complicated technique for a heavier Martian surface rover which worked brilliantly was a combination sky-crane: the spacecraft braked into the atmosphere using a heat shield, deployed a parachute, discarded the parachute and heat shield, leveled using retro rockets, then lowered the lander gently on a series of cables from this rocket-stabilized platform, which then flew off to crash at a safe distance once the payload was on the surface.

Occasionally, a brute force technique is used where there is no real further softening of the landing after entry and the instrument package is hardened sufficiently to land at higher speeds and still meet mission objectives.

In the case of the Lunar landings of the Apollo missions, a semi-automatic technique was used that a human operator could override for lateral movement in selection of an improved landing site clear of debris, and a reaction control system (RCS) used a cant sensor to keep the naturally-unstable lunar module upright during descent.