A one-minute clip of the reentry was posted on X this week on NASA’s Orion Spacecraft account, along with a link to the full 25-minute version. Since then, the short clip has gone viral for obvious reasons; this is crazy!

The uncrewed Artemis 1 mission went to the moon last November and was the first test of the massive space launch system that NASA hopes will one day return humans to the moon and eventually Mars.

This was also an opportunity to put the Orion spacecraft to the ultimate test. A partially reusable spaceship designed for a crew of up to four people. During the Artemis 1 mission, Orion was sent into space empty for 25 days, including six days in lunar orbit, before being returned to Earth; all of this was documented by 16 cameras on the spacecraft.

On its return, Orion crashed directly into Earth’s atmosphere, bursting into flames and “bouncing” like a rock, creating a plasma wave behind it. As Chris Combs, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, an institution that works closely with NASA, explained to

“Two quick things since everyone is asking the same question,” Combs wrote to X.

• “parts are not an “ablative” heat shield. It does not come off in pieces, it burns continuously. I believe these parts are the low emission ribbon that Orion is wrapped around.
• “Sudden changes and cycles are the firing of control engines.”

He also added that the clicking and knocking sounds are valves operating the control motors. On December 11, 2022, Orion parachuted into the Pacific Ocean. Orion tested a new type of reentry process: a “jump,” in which the spacecraft bounces off the atmosphere, allowing NASA to more closely control where the spacecraft will land, regardless of where it first hits the atmosphere.

“The gateway will help Orion land near the coast of the United States, where recovery teams will wait to return the spacecraft to land,” Chris Madsen, Orion’s guidance, navigation and control subsystem manager, said in April 2022.

On its first mission, Orion reached 434,500 kilometers (270,000 miles) from Earth; this reached further than any human-carrying spacecraft to date.