Artemis Launch

The heat shield and spacesuits must be designed to cope with that.

If you rolled off a 4 foot wall, it’d take you about 0.5 seconds and you’d hit the ground at about 11mph, and it would hurt and you’d probably do yourself some serious injury.

Not planning on trying it any time soon. :grinning:

Re-entry trajectories are carefully calculated to make sure that both the spacecraft and the crew are never exposed to forces beyond what they can tolerate so that when they do touch down, they do so fully intact.

Just watched Apollo 13 on TV. Did a few calculations and it’s mind boggling. Before entering the atmosphere, they were travelling at around 6.5 miles per second. That’s per second!!! After a few short minutes, they splashed down at around 20mph. Absolutely insane rate of deceleration!!

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Not knowing if the heat shield was damaged must have seemed an eternal few minutes. They have to land where expected for recovery.

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