will probably land on dry groumd. Given that it lands by parachute, where would be a likely landing place? The Great American Desert?
No idea but the Bonneville Salt Flats seems like a good choice. 47 mi[sup]2[/sup] is a nice big target and nothing to interfere with the landing like pesky trees or cattle or something.
White Sands wouldn’t be a bad choice either. Lots of room to hit on the missile range with nothing nearby except Alamogordo. Would have to miss the mountains, though.
Some cornfield in the Midwest, perhaps?
Kansas.
With a little luck, right on top of a certain “minister” whose initials are P.P.
Although I know from second-hand experience that there are some bad places to land, in White Sands. Some of my colleagues recently launched a sounding rocket experiment at White Sands. It came down in the middle of a weapons test area containing an unknown amount of unexploded ordinance. They had to get all sorts of base personnel to the site, and sent in a special armored forklift to retrieve it.
The base personnel were, however, very surprised by this: Apparently, the site is about one ten thousandth the area of the base, and they’d never had anything land in there before.