Abril 10, 2026

Artemis splashdown, live.

Ipinaskil ni Ann Althouse sa 6:55 PM
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29 (na) komento:

SoLastMillennium ayon kay ...

So is there a rush to the bathroom, now that they're home?

4/10/26, 7:01 PM
JRoberts ayon kay ...

Amazing to watch, but I could do with less “verbal froth” and giddiness from the various talking heads.

4/10/26, 7:13 PM
Leland ayon kay ...

A bit rocky when under the drogue chutes, but the landing looked good.

4/10/26, 7:13 PM
n.n ayon kay ...

Next year on the dark side of the moon.

4/10/26, 7:17 PM
Hassayamper ayon kay ...

Nice job.

One very cool footnote, the high-flying reconnaissance aircraft that imaged the capsule after re-entry was a WB-57 Canberra. This aircraft was based on a British bomber that began its initial design while World War II was still raging, first flew in 1949, and was purchased by the USAF for service that began in 1953. It was the first USAF jet powered bomber to see combat. This individual aircraft was built no later than 1957, nearly 70 years ago.

4/10/26, 7:21 PM
Jimmy ayon kay ...

Good to see they are back and safe. And NASA is actually doing something, after all these years of DEI and climate change BS.
I think they didn't have a choice, otherwise Musk would have done it sooner, and cheaper.

4/10/26, 7:28 PM
Leland ayon kay ...

ET can’t phone home.

4/10/26, 7:36 PM
Original Mike ayon kay ...

Comm problem?
I smell a coverup, they're all fried to a crisp in there.

4/10/26, 7:42 PM
Hassayamper ayon kay ...

So the 70 year old airplane works like a dream, and the 6 month old radios crap out right when they're needed...?

4/10/26, 7:43 PM
Leland ayon kay ...

Flying around the moon and re-entering at those speeds is fairly novel, having not been done in 5 decades. However, they have been doing recoveries from splash down with every Dragon ISS mission. You would think this would be the smooth part.

Then again, SpaceX has a special boat that picks the capsule out of the water and the crew gets out once the capsule is secure on the recovery boat. NASA prefers to drag the crew out into the water and hoist them in a horse collar to be taken onboard the recovery vessel. So it takes more coordination (more tax dollars).

4/10/26, 7:52 PM
Leland ayon kay ...

Wow, 2 hour requirement to get crew out. 2 hours. Already 1 hour has gone by. No one has gotten out. No “front porch”. No stabilization ring.

SpaceX Dragon requirement is 60 minutes, and those astronauts would have been in space around 180 days, which is to say they’ll find it difficult to walk.

4/10/26, 8:12 PM
Leland ayon kay ...

You might think it took “rocket scientist” to come up with this Rube Goldberg solution to extract the astronauts. This took civil servants tasked with spending as much budget as possible to come up with this many one time use equipment. They needed that “front porch” because? The rigid inflatable boats couldn’t just be lashed to the side?

I’ve seen the Coast Guard pick people off roofs in flooded neighborhoods in less time. I’m fairly certain they could have tugged the capsule to the ship and used a crane to hoist it aboard by now, if not just pulled it into the well deck.

Supposedly this was the “fastest” way to get them to the sick bay. 90 minutes just to get them out of the vessel. They still need to be hoisted onto the helicopter and flown back. Then the ground crew still has to recover the capsule.

4/10/26, 8:39 PM
doctrev ayon kay ...

It's reasonable to terminate the feeds at a certain point during re-entry, but I can see why conspiracy minds would hyperfocus on it. Some nice shots of the Earth, though, and the Internet era makes it very easy to watch them again and again.

May the space age continue.

4/10/26, 9:15 PM
Big Mike ayon kay ...

Wow. Under Trump's leadership NASA has managed to catch up to where they were around Christmas 1968. It beats where NASA was under Carter, Reagan, either Bush, Clinton, Obama, or Biden, but there's still a long way to go.

4/10/26, 9:19 PM
Aggie ayon kay ...

@Leland, offshore vessels have come a long way since Mercury's era. You now have dynamic positioning that will keep a large vessel locked in by GPS, where its thrusters keep it on station with a circle of a meter or two. And you now have deck cranes on vessels that are compensated, meaning the vessel can bob on the waves but the crane hook will stay fixed in 3D space. Plucking things much larger than this capsule in and out of the water has become rather mundane now, so I'm surprised that NASA hasn't caught up.

4/10/26, 9:22 PM
wildswan ayon kay ...

It was nicely done. I, too, felt that Elon Musk's team would have moved at the faster clip and with better comments by the reporter. The pictures were fascinating but the plan of the whole (the front porch, the doctor going in to see how the crew was when we know many people have been out in space, the helicopter lift) and the reporting on it all was "dated" which is weird because it had never been done before. But it was a way of doing the job and talking about it that was Seventies. I just mean - as a way of presenting the mission, as a show, if you will, I felt as if I were back in the old days which I distinctly remember. As a mission, the whole thing was incredible.

4/10/26, 9:35 PM
Leland ayon kay ...

Aggie, I can’t imagine any Inherently Safer Design (ISD) review coming up with putting that many sailors and divers at risk in the open ocean to rescue 4 people that are essentially in a life raft. Just hook that up to a tug and bring it alongside. I agree, any installation vessel with dynamic positioning and a 100 ton heave compensated crane would have plucked that thing out of the water in half the time it took NASA to install the front porch.

SpaceX uses a ship with an A-frame hoist in the back to lift the capsule onto the deck. Yeah, it has dynamic positioning, and can maneuver right over the capsule. One or two divers put in harms way to rig the capsule to the lift. That’s it. Then the whole thing is onboard in under an hour, and they can extract the crew on a litter if they need it.

Deep sea installation vessels are expensive to sortie and operate daily. However, I bet they are cheaper than the engineering that was spent to come up with the Orion recovery method. Maybe $10 million to pluck the capsule out. They have a medical bay and helicopter deck on those installation vessels too. But then, they would have only used 1 S70. Think of all the aviation fuel and emissions that would have been saved.

4/10/26, 10:05 PM
Little Excursion™️ ayon kay ...

Nobody is happier that these astronauts landed tonight than Eric Swalwell.

4/10/26, 10:15 PM
Achilles ayon kay ...

Hassayamper said...

So the 70 year old airplane works like a dream, and the 6 month old radios crap out right when they're needed...?

We all wish they were 6 months old... Congress picked what radios were used.

The radios are not that new.

4/10/26, 11:19 PM
NKP ayon kay ...

The 70-year-old airplane also worked better than MS Outlook.

We had these as part of the 8th TFW at Ubon, in 70/71. Lost one to a mid-air one night, as I recall

4/11/26, 2:38 AM
Lem Vibe Bandit ayon kay ...

It was perfect. Too perfect.

4/11/26, 2:49 AM
Clyde ayon kay ...

I think that commercial space companies like SpaceX are the wave of the future, not NASA. They are more nimble and are not beholden to Congress as a jobs/procurement program for their districts. I was thinking about this earlier today, and the quote from "Ghostbusters" came to mind:

Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd): "Personally, I liked the University. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

4/11/26, 3:51 AM
Lem Vibe Bandit ayon kay ...

YouTube: Speedup re-entry video from a camera outside the capsule. The camera must’ve been made from the same material as airplanes flight recorders are made of? Idk.

4/11/26, 5:29 AM
Lem Vibe Bandit ayon kay ...

Oh. The capsule is made from the strongest materials… never mind.

4/11/26, 5:34 AM
Enigma ayon kay ...

I came here to say what many of you said above: the space flight was great while the water extraction was comical government design-by-committee complexity.

Brings to mind the old joke: How many government managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

One to hold the bulb and stand on the conference table, and 12 to rotate the table in circles.

It was a Keystone Kops extraction. They sent 4 medical attendants INTO the craft without the bloody inflatable exit raft in place. So, double the trouble of getting 8 people out without someone falling into the ocean.

Visible Assets:

One floating capsule with 4 people
Half a dozen to a dozen boats
Two helicopters; unknown observation craft
Four medical attendants
Five divers to install the floating platform
One or three people to man each boat and helicopter

Musk may have had an inflatable boat with a "U" notch cut from one end to match the shape of the capsule. He'd have attached the boat to the capsule with 3 attachment loops, and used 2 medical attendants to assist the 4 astronauts out. He'd have been done in 20 minutes instead of 2 hours.

4/11/26, 5:54 AM
Leland ayon kay ...

Regarding the 70-year-old plane performance, you are aware that it was last in the news landing on its belly at Ellington. Then again, the failure seemed more pilot related.

4/11/26, 5:55 AM
Leland ayon kay ...

Enigma, slight correction... They used 4 helicopters, plus the WB-57 observation aircraft. Technically, there was a Gulfstream 5 observing as well, because it was mentioned as the aircraft with the IR sensors tracking the craft during the communications blackout portion of entry.

4/11/26, 5:59 AM
Cappy ayon kay ...

Outstanding

4/11/26, 7:56 AM
Jamie ayon kay ...

I'm glad everyone is safely back - to many horrible memories of the shuttle disasters. One thing Musk has done is remove - not just alleviate, even though of course I know there are still risks - my creeping anxiety every time someone is out of the atmosphere; SpaceX makes the whole process seem unremarkable. NASA hasn't managed that feat yet.

4/11/26, 8:24 AM

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