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Decades ago we used large navy ships with huge crews (aircraft carriers) to recover human crewed space craft at sea. In wartime and duo to costs it would be hard to see this as a cost effective way to recover a ballistic reentry CEV.
However the navy does have a large fleet of civil service and contract crewed public vessels. They are manned by crews of 50 to 150 persons as compared to 3000 on a carrier. We could have a MSC special mission ship recover the CEV or save more money by diverting a MSC ship from its existing mission. The MSC fleet has Navy helicopters used to transport cargo and mail to ships at sea; these could double as a capsule and crew recovery bird. Money saved could be plowed into more frequent flight rates for the CEV.
tried to post this in human missions to mars but the forum kicks me back to guest after signing in and does not allow a new topic
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You bring up an interesting point of expendable with splash down recovery versus the re-useable airport runway landing. Which would be cheaper ? We have no numbers for the mission recovery cost from the Apollo era that at least I am aware of since it was probably within the military budget back then.
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