We only have a day now to get all the recovery crew Planet of the Apes costumes.
ROTFLMAO!!
This is crazy. The Artemis II had to get fast enough to escape our gravity, flew to the moon, did a Tokyo drift around the moon gaining speed the whole time.
There are few good options to slow down in space, and the plan is to hit the brakes by slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed that so far outside human experience that the numbers don’t make sense.
Re-entry is actually the craziest, and most dangerous part of this mission.
I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I’m a Challenger-kid and this whole business gives me anxiety.
Columbia was worse in that respect; they broke apart on re-entry. :(
TIL that objects re-entering the atmosphere vary considerably in their initial velocities, and that ones from further out (e.g. lunar visits) tend to be much faster than those from LEO. It’s not intuitively surprising, but I’d assumed that given the “narrow window” used for re-entry, all objects needed to dump enough velocity to arrive in a fairly tight band.
Right, except they weren’t “gaining speed the whole time”. They just kept the speed they had at the end of the last engine burn. Which is still a lot of speed
They kept the energy, together kinetic (related to they speed) and potential (related to their position). They actual speed/velocity has been changing all the time as the energy has been exchanged one for the other.
It’s pretty wild to look at the moon this morning and to think that people just whipped around it recently. Hopefully soon when I look at the moon I can say that there are people on it!
Hopefully before I die I can say there are people living on it permanently. And someone was finally on Mars.
