Things of a similar density and frontal area fall thru the air at about the same rate in general. Think of the space shuttle re-entry tragedy where the majorit

Things of a similar density and frontal area fall thru the air at about the same rate in general. Think of the space shuttle re-entry tragedy where the majority of the parts fell to ground in a sort of shotgun tight pattern, no random parts surprisingly hit Hawaii or glided over to Japan. Maybe another analogy is they used to make lead shot by dripping liquid lead down a couple hundred foot tall tower and the balls always seem to land about the same place although they're not identical compared to ball bearing production for example. A lot of the expensive and interesting aerodynamics research into blunt bottomed re-entry vehicles for spacecraft and ICBM payloads goes into the difficult task of getting a stable non spinning stable capsule and a reasonably high lift to drag ratio for moving around to navigate into a target, IF you need to move around, which was needed a lot more for ICBM MIRV warheads than for manned capsules. Ironically the navigation of the manned programs was excellent such that they didn't need to use much of the possible L/D ratio maneuvering on re-entry, can just reenter the command module ballistically without requiring any navigation corrections, and if the service module is also coming in ballistically because of a software bug, they're gonna end up pretty close together. Now if pre-re-entry navigation was messed up (maybe on purpose to keep the SM and CM apart, as it probably should have been designed?) such that on re-entry the command module had to tilt slightly to use its L/D ratio to glide slightly north perhaps 200 miles, then rather rapidly the CM under controlled flight would be 200 miles away from the uncontrolled ballistic SM. However, navigation was so perfect they both just kinda fell into place... I found a nice report from googleing from NTRS where they analyzed the data from the actual Apollo 4 test flight and the CM had a ridiculous near straight line L/D ratio between 0.36 and 0.38 for almost the entire re-entry, probably as designed, which must have made the flight computer math requirements very simple for those old days. Of course if you are dead on course you don't need any navigation corrections on re-entry at all, resulting in the SM almost landing on your head because it was uncontrolled due to an oversight.