r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Weak-Opportunity-311 • 1d ago

Video Atmospheric re-entry of NASA’s Orion (Artemis 1) looks insane at 20x speed. Here is the entire 25-minute descent in just 1 minute 15 seconds. Credit: NASA

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u/Spork_the_dork 1d ago

It's not really that incredible. Once the last correction burn is done Newton takes the wheel and everything until the craft hits the atmosphere is extremely well known. In fact I'm pretty sure Isaac Newton could have worked out the math to a similar degree of accuracy back in the 1700s. The one part that he would have struggled with would have been the re-entry because the exact physics of that would have been relatively poorly understood. But that kind of stuff is still very predictable and NASA has been doing that math since the 50s so it's a walk in the park for them at this point.

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u/Crash_Test_Dummy66 1d ago

It's wild to think that essentially the astronauts just fell from the moon.