Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

hitting land with a water-based landing system probably isn't great, but that still seems nonfatal (if unpleasant). is the "danger" blurb all just incorrectly carried over from apollo, where skipping means a potentially still-elliptical orbit and life support would run out?

Gotcha, thanks! Yeah, the minor thermal load for long periods of time seems potentially bad, I'm obviously not a heatshield expert, haha. although I'm side-eyeing "generates little or no lift", makes me doubt the article a little - e.g. apollo's 0.368 L/D is not insignificant

Yeah, I don’t know enough about rocket science to say anything about that I can imagine @sgrif knowing more.

Skipping isn't necessarily catastrophically bad depending on the orbit, but if you skip on a lunar re-entry that can mean many hours or even days before re-entry. The service module was jettisoned at this point, so that can be bad. More generally it's about thermal load though

The shallower your re-entry the more thermal load overall the craft will have to endure, but in exchange you will have less peak heating. More thermal load means you need more ablative heat shielding, meaning more mass, so you want to have the steepest reentry you can survive

For crewed craft, g forces endured by the crew is also a factor, which are lower on shallower re-entry. The film return capsule in the CORONA program would have taken upwards of 20-30 Gs at peak. Gemini wouldn't have had more than 3-4

TL;DR: Yes, your intuitions were correct both for apollo and the minor thermal load for increased periods of time being bad for LEO missions