Jeffrey Williams

It's always a risk, and it's never routine.

We treat every flight as critical as the previous flights.

Great to be with you, Georgia.

Thank you.

Of course, it's kind of key after you do a successful mission, the hardest part.

One of the hard parts is reentering in the atmosphere, critical part, going through the heated phase.

Of course, the G loading coming through the atmosphere and then finally getting subsonic and the parachute opening sequence starts, which takes a little time.

I can tell you from my experience that that was the longest 25 seconds of my life.

And then, of course, drifting down on your parachute, then you land in the ocean and they have to be recovered.

Sure.

So now they're out in deep space, and they've just transitioned from having the lunar gravity be overcome by Earth gravity.

So they're approaching the Earth now.

They've done a course correction so that they impact the atmosphere at just the right angle, kind of at the edge of the Earth.

And once they impact the atmosphere, then the drag of the atmosphere will slow them down, put them deeper into the atmosphere.

And as they're slowing down and getting deeper into the denser atmosphere, the G loading, the acceleration that they feel builds up.

It'll build up to about four Gs.

At the same time, they will be literally in a fireball because of the speed, the friction increases the temperature outside to several thousand degrees.

So it's heating along with the G-loading, and then that slows them down, dissipates all of that energy that they have entering the atmosphere, which they'll be going about 25,000 miles per hour when they hit the upper part of the atmosphere.

That's a lot of energy to dissipate.

Yeah, you finally go through that fireball that I talked about and the high G-loading.