posted 03-09-2016 09:54 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by ilbasso:
Jack Lousma told me at Spacefest that he took this photo.

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The temperature on the Shuttle heat shield gets up to 2,500 degrees, 3,000 or so on the leading edges, whereas the capsule heat shield gets up to 5,000 degrees. In the Apollo capsule, you’re looking backwards. Fragments of the heat shield are burning away to take the heat away from your spacecraft and they envelop the Command Module in kind of a sheath. They form a fireball about 30 feet in the direction you’re looking. You’re looking backwards at a shimmering, mean, hot looking fireball. It breaks up when you fire the thrusters on the spacecraft because you’ve got to roll the spacecraft to keep it on trajectory. Those thrusters are firing right by your head. It’s like having your head in a barrel with somebody beating on it with a sledgehammer. Bang bang bang, and there is all this rolling, and the fireball out there.

Once again, the capsule is more dynamic. You get down to where you get through the major heat pulse and then you have to get the chutes out. To do that, you have to blow off the nose ring of the capsule. That goes tumbling off with a pyrotechnic bang and then you get these two small drogue chutes out at 25,000 feet. They’re white. They’re on lanyards that are about 30 feet long. They’re dancing around up there trying to slow you down and stabilize the spacecraft.

Then at 10,000 feet you get rid of those drogue chutes. You cut them loose and quickly leave them behind. Now you really have a sinking feeling, and you get the main parachutes out. You’re below 10,000 feet now. You’re getting ready to hit the water. The chutes, as they come out, all scrunched up or gathered at the base in what is called a “reefed” configuration. That’s good, because you’re going fast, and if they were to blossom out immediately, the panels would be blown out. You have to slow down for a while. After a few seconds, those reefing lines are cut, the parachutes blossom out and then to their full size, and you wait for the landing.

The capsule is suspended below the parachutes on an angle. The heat shield is not parallel to the ocean surface. You don’t want to do a belly flopper. The capsule hangs on an angle so when it hits the water, it slides in. It’s like a train wreck when you hit the water. If you hit on one side of the wave it’s going to be more of a train wreck than if you hit on the other side. When you splash down, you go completely submerged, and you come up either right side up or upside down. We bobbed up upside down in the Skylab.