Space shuttle landing, video from the cockpit. All the way from space to ground.
Tarran said:
Not quite from space: the video starts at 70,000 feet ~21,000 meters altitude.
There is no physical border between space and the Earth's atmosphere: the air gets thinner and thinner the higher one climbs. Rather people arbitrarily choose an altitude as the boundary.
The U.S. govt uses 80km as its boundary. Some standards bodies use 100 km as the boundry, mainly because that is the altitude at which the air becomes too thin to aerodynamically support aircraft travelling at below orbital velocity.
eolake said:
You can fly as high as 100km? Kewl.
(That would seem to me to be the minimum boundary to set then.)
4 comments:
Not quite from space: the video starts at 70,000 feet ~21,000 meters altitude.
There is no physical border between space and the Earth's atmosphere: the air gets thinner and thinner the higher one climbs. Rather people arbitrarily choose an altitude as the boundary.
The U.S. govt uses 80km as its boundary. Some standards bodies use 100 km as the boundry, mainly because that is the altitude at which the air becomes too thin to aerodynamically support aircraft travelling at below orbital velocity.
You can fly as high as 100km? Kewl.
(That would seem to me to be the minimum boundary to set then.)
Damn the approach is steep! No common measure with an airplane, that's for sure. Still appears fairly maneuverable, though, which hints at a very high approach speed.
Cool video.
Yes, surely the only thing which makes the approach less than vertical (with the stubby wings) is the very high speed. Must be a bitch to land.
I once flew to Germany in the biggest plane I've been on. I sat next to a nice stewardess who were strapped in for the long approach. We chatted, and she told me one of her colleagues had been killed by an air hole, thrown against the ceiling.
There was strong wind at landing, and the captain went around twice. Very much swerving. I felt sick, the stewardess told me she did too, and a young girl threw up. Great stuff.
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