What's their go around checklist like?
On orbit: Business as usual.
High altitude: Pick predesignated alternate. Land there.
During the terminal landing phase: Kachunk, grind, grind, scrape, grind, scrrraapppeeegrrrinnnddd, sound of bush branches snapping, griind, scrape, dirt and dust everywhere.
Seems like they have an awful lot of faith in the gear extension system(s). Must be pretty reliable.
Shortly after the Challenger oopsie, I ran across something about the emergency gear extension system or at least a prototype design from the early 70's. I'm not sure if it was actually in use or one of the things that was originally designed then cut down to something less weighty. IIRC, basically step one was the standard gear extension system. If that failed, the emergency hydraulic system designed to solve the problem 'right now' would drop the gear. If that didn't work, the backup emergency system did it's thing and made sure it was down. If that failed, they were out of time to be playing around being polite and a pyrotechnic emergency gear system fired, tore up whatever was necessary to get things moving and shoved the gear down into place by brute force. I have no clue if that is what is actually on the vehicles though.
Whatever they use, I'm certain that the Apollo era designers who were pretty serious about being creative and making things work right the first time were told something along the lines of "The wheels HAVE TO come down and they WILL be down when it lands and that's all there is to it. Understand? Good, get out your pencils and start designing."
