The postflight recovery of a Ballistic Missile Re-entry Vehicle is perhaps one of the best ways of gathering data to verify the adequacy of design. The data obtained is indisputable.
Since the beginning of re-entry vehicle flight testing, many attempts have been made to recover data that identified performance of the re-entry vehicle while being exposed to an operational flight environment. Telemetered instrumentation has been the mainstay of this need for data, although postflight recovery of the hardware, which would offer final proof of performance has been the desire.
Trying to reach this goal, the Air Force in the past has devised various methods such as, ejecting capsules during flight that contain data recorders, and deploying parachutes during flight to decrease the forces of impact on the reentry vehicle so that meaningful data could be gathered. Systems such as these work, however, each either produce only a recording of happenings or impair the true flight conditions.
The United States, acknowledging the importance of physical recovery, has developed two locations in the Pacific Ocean that are capable of recovering a re-entry vehicle that has been exposed to true flight environments and permitted to re-enter the atmosphere and impact under normal flight conditions.
The capabilities and techniques employed to locate and retrieve a vehicle after impact are in part, operations used in other places to perform other tasks, but when used in combination they can accomplish the task of physical recovery of a Ballistic Missile Re-entry Vehicle
