Whew…

Posted on by April 10, 2026

Welp, they made it back 1707 PDT!

I think a lot of us holding our breath can now breathe!

Now comes the debrief and the technical look at the systems…

Whew…

Comments

Whew… — 9 Comments

  1. Stopped watching after 45 minutes or so. Too painful to watch. The retrieval of astronauts and capsule was so 1960s and amateurish.
    Why was the big boat was about 1.5 miles away – incapable to position windward 300 ft, with capsule aft quarter (either side)?
    Why not use a remote control boat with a “sniffer”, or manned with the person in proper gear (like when the shuttle or x-37 lands), soon after splashing to check for hydrazine? Why not use a small floating dock style craft to lift and secure the capsule while becoming the platform for the handling of the astronauts? Or, do like SpaceX and use a crane.
    Otherwise, very cool.

  2. The reentry orbit is what I found concerning. The skip method uses the atmosphere to help slow the capsule, and it was controlled by a computer. One glitch, and I doubt manual control would have happened fast enough to stop a disaster.

    • Yeah, the heat shield survivability depended so much on the angle of entry. the previous one failed and they experimented on this one with the astronauts as part of the experiment.

      Honestly, they are lucky they survived reentry.

      • Yes, somebody at NASA (or the congresscritters involved) should have been shot for not insisting on an unmanned version of this flight*. There were so many things that were new and untested, Murphy must have been on a vacation. (The toilet troubles don’t count.)

        Once the craft made it past the plasma blackout and comms were restored, I felt I could breathe properly again.

        (*) More likely shot for insisting it had to be manned. If the flight couldn’t have been done without a crew, it should have been redesigned to let it be. (Either that, declare victory and hire SpaceX.)

  4. NASA published a detailed timeline for every event until splashdown, then nothing, even after the event. If we had known there would be a 90 minute wait before getting the astronauts out the whole evolution would have looked a lot better. As it was there looked like too much ‘mill about smartly’ going on.

  5. One, I think I am a little too young to understand how traumatized some of the older people are about some of the incidents that I had not even heard of. (The twitch streamer I watched mostly does videogames, but apparently has an encyclopediac grasp of fatal spaceflight incidents, including soviet. )

    I’m a bit too trained for instant gratification. I very much want to move to powered landings on flat surfaces, and discontinue this thing of recovering capsules from the ocean.

    They had the boats out for four hours before splash down, to stage things. I am sure that this is just me not being able to understand proper context, but because I did not understand the ‘stuff going on’ (that I heard explained later), it looked like a bunch of waiting and or possible serious problems. It was maybe actually a bunch of complicated movements pulled off neatly, and over explaining might have made hiccups obvious. Anyway, it was on me to be wanting to see a gaming stream from the same guy, instead of simply quitting immediately when I was satisfied that the astronauts were recovered, and bored.

    Anyway, these bespoke legacy designs that don’t fly enough for experimental sampling that captures much irregularity do not feel like the future to me. It is not good for one man’s personal insanity to drive the future of engineering across so many applications, but when the old guard is pushed out, there will still be a lot of room for outside voices.

  7. Jamie/Jess/B- That was right out of the Apollo playbook…sigh and no, if the computer died, they would have too, IMHO. B- You I believe you are absolutely correct!

    Tuvela- You and me both!

    Rick- Sigh…yeah…

    Bob- Good points, and even in the ‘old’ days it was NOT a quick evolution.

    WSF- Agreed!