This video found me this morning. I don’t follow NASA as closely as I should, since everything they put out totally hooks me. 

Anyway, this is video from the Artemis 1 Orion re-entry, which happened a year ago. First I watched the Timelapse, 1 minutes version:

Which immediately made me start the real-time version. I wish there was a narrated version of this, detailing what we’re looking at and what’s happening. But it was amazing nonetheless:

Here’s video about the capsule itself. I thought that the whole thing was unmanned,  but I was way wrong! 

And here’s the official site for the mission: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/orion-spacecraft/ 

NASA needs a new PR strategy, because this stuff is fascinating. There’s so much content and it so rarely finds me.

This really neat bit from Metafilter adds even more depth:

I’m gonna add a bit of commentary about this, because not only is this awesome footage, it’s showing something extremely cool that had never been done before.

With Apollo and other capsules, you’d always hear about how the entry angle was critical – come in too steep and you’d burn up, come in too shallow and you’d bounce off the atmosphere back into space. Well, now they’re deliberately bouncing the re-entry. And not just bouncing it – they’re skipping it across the top of atmosphere like a stone across a pond.

The heatshield starts burning hard at about 4:30 into the video. Then at 5:16, the thrusters fire to roll it over. It’s a circular capsule, but by design, its center of gravity isn’t quite in the middle. So by rolling it, you can adjust how it balances. That means the roll control translates into pitch control. By rolling it they’re adjusting the angle of attack.

Now see what happens as a result – until that point, the clouds had been getting steadily closer, but from about 6:00, the surface is receding again. They pitched it up and bounced off the atmosphere, hard enough that the capsule goes almost all the way back into space – from a low point of about 60km altitude up to just shy of the Karman line.

Slowly gravity brings it back, and from around 14:00 it re-enters a second time. And now it’s rolling almost constantly to adjust the trajectory. You know how when you skip a stone just right, it doesn’t plop into the water at the end, but instead the bounces get closer and closer together until it’s just sliding across the top of the water? It’s doing something like that, but with precision control.

Between tweaking the initial bounce, and the adjustments in the final descent, they can pick exactly where to put the capsule down over something like a 5000 mile range. They get to spread out the deceleration over a longer period, so the astronauts don’t have to sit through 6.4g like they did on Apollo. And they get to cool off the heatshield – by the time it’s made that long arc after the first re-entry, it’s coming in cold again.

Artemis may look a lot like a re-run of Apollo. But the sheer level of engineering confidence on display here is incomparable. Not only did NASA pull this trick off: they decided to make it a core function which the safety of the mission would depend on. They automated it such that the spacecraft could do it by itself with nobody in the cockpit. And it worked, perfectly, the very first time.

It is an absolute flex of control engineering, every bit as impressive as SpaceX landing rockets on the pad.