Kevin Nolan

In fact, NASA called it the most sophisticated spacecraft they've ever built.

And it will splash down and they will aim to reuse it.

The main parts of it, the heat shields have to be replaced and all the rest of it.

But actually, they're going to reuse it up to three to four times.

And lucky Martin have built three of them in total for the moment.

Okay.

That's right, well, yeah.

Yeah, so actually, basically, in fact, just for the precise timing, they'll start to enter the atmosphere around seven minutes to one Irish time, and then they should be splashed down about 13 minutes later.

So it's a 13-minute event, and it will be very, very high tense.

Now, what they had hoped to do was a re-entry where they would skip off the Earth's atmosphere, actually, a bit like a stone on water, that would do that multiple times to reduce the energy so that the heat shield wouldn't actually heat up as much.

What they found was when they did that with Artemis I was some cracks appeared, micro cracks, we should say, in the actual heat shield itself.

So they're going for a more direct entry like the Apollo astronauts did straight down into the Earth's atmosphere.

Now, it actually will get a bit hotter.

It'll be a bit more direct,

but they just know that it won't cause the kind of the cracking that, or well, at least reduces to an extraordinary amount.

So it's a safer orbit.

So they are actually, unfortunately, not doing what would have been the nicer ride.

And in fact, the other advantage of the skip type of re-entry is they would have been able to land with high precision, say, within about 50 kilometers of where they intended.

Whereas the old Apollo 1, they had to put ships for hundreds of kilometers all over the Pacific Ocean to try and find them, you know?

Well, I mean, it's enough to melt iron.