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Varda Capsule Reentry – Five Minutes from LEO to Earth [video]
- enderfusion 3y agoThis is what filming hypersonic plasma with a gopro from a reentry capsule looks like. For the true space nerds, here is the 27min uncut version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWxl921rMgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWxl921rMgM
- kragen 3y agothis is so awesome, thank you also, congratulations. space is hard, and what you've done is harder than reentry
- bragr 3y agoWatching this somehow makes the whole MOOSE concept [1] of a person falling from orbit seem a lot more reasonable. It wouldn't be pleasant obviously https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
- lupusreal 3y agoEventually Red Bull is going to sponsor somebody to do this.
- IncreasePosts 3y agoNo, it's going to be some old, rich tech nerd! (eg Alan Eustace, who broke Felix's balloon record shortly after it was set but without anywhere near as mich fanfare)
- dekhn 3y agoThe ultimate billionare sport would be basically parachuting from space (MOOSE-style). It would be such a rush. I volunteer Elon for initial testing.
- kragen 3y agothis is great! i think you could make it as pleasant as a typical rush-hour trip on the city bus: louder and more dangerous, but with less people, and perhaps roughly as comfortable, at least if you have the kind of rush hour where you are frequently in danger of fainting from the heat
- enderfusion 3y agoMaaaaaaybe. But we did pull like 20g+ on descent, so that's a bit problematic
- kragen 3y agoyou'd have to decelerate several times slower (four gees to be safe, three gees to be gravitron-style 'comfortable'), but that's feasible in an aerodynamic (plasmadynamic?) fashion, even with a relatively low mass-per-unit-area projectile like a person facing forward
- myself248 3y agoYou kidding? I'd pay to try that. Suck it, Baumgartner!
- enderfusion 3y agoGrabbed the wrong link, that's the 5min version.
- notso411 3y agoLooks identical
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RIMR 3y agoI wasn't able to respond to any other comment in your history, because pretty much everything you post is dead. You don't seem to respond to the obvious feedback from that, but somebody needs to recommend that you stop making flippant, dismissive, and generally worthless comments, because I've never seen an account as deeply downvoted on HN as yours.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- logtempo 3y agoI find the most crazy thing is not the reentry, but the number of objects (satellites) visible at the beginning of the video. And maybe the most worrying part is that there is more and more unidentified objects: https://sdup.esoc.esa.int/discosweb/statistics/ https://sdup.esoc.esa.int/discosweb/statistics/ Also the number of payload really rised after 2020 (because of spaceX I guess). 1980: less than 1000 objects Today: Almost 10000 objects, including approx. 4000 in LEO only.
- causal 3y agoPretty sure that's just debris from the separation, most likely to end burning up in the atmosphere too.
- enderfusion 3y agoYeah, that's some dust from the heat shield
- pfdietz 3y agoIf not, their orbits would rapidly decay due to very low ballistic coefficient (mass/area).
- pfdietz 3y agoThose little white specs moving from lower left toward upper right? I think that's just tiny pieces of debris dislodged when the RV separated, shining in the sunlight.
- logtempo 3y agoMake sense...still impressive to have x10 more objects floating around in less than half a century.
- teraflop 3y agoThose specks are almost certainly not distant satellites, but very nearby specks of dust and debris caused by the separation process. One dead giveaway is that they don't appear to be moving in perfectly straight lines. If they were distant, this would imply they were not free-falling but under powered flight, at an implausibly high acceleration. You can see the same phenomenon in e.g. film footage of Apollo stage separation: https://youtu.be/9DNnZ82Kg3w https://youtu.be/9DNnZ82Kg3w
- wkat4242 3y agoSo we know what dropping from hyperspace looks like? Area 51 confirmed!!
- isx726552 3y agoWas there a jump cut at the end or was the person collecting the chute really mere steps away from where it landed?
- enderfusion 3y agoJump cut. We helicoptered in, but it took about 20 minutes.
- athenot 3y agoThat is still an impressive aim that y'all achieved. Congrats!
- focusedone 3y agoIDK what your job title is, but 'helicoptered in to collect a recently landed spacecraft from the desert' sounds like an awesome day at work.
- bombcar 3y agoSeriously muddy sneakers tho.
- marssaxman 3y agoI laughed - looks exactly like the "playa stilts" you see after rainfall at Burning Man.
- bombcar 3y agoReminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrxPuk0JefA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrxPuk0JefA
- enderfusion 3y agoI don't really have a job description, I just solve problems.
- baerrie 3y agoCan anyone explain the random bright flashes at the apex of its velocity?
- enderfusion 3y agoTiny pieces of the heatshield debonding from the craft and interacting with the plasma.
- danesparza 3y ago"...and interacting with the plasma" That sounds like an exciting day at work. ;-)
- rbanffy 3y agoRapid unscheduled dismantling happening at the molecular level. In this case, it wasn't really unscheduled.
- elasker 3y agoCompare the heat shield in the pic here (before launch): https://x.com/VardaSpace/status/1671621386065027072?s=20 https://x.com/VardaSpace/status/1671621386065027072?s=20 To here (after reentry): https://x.com/VardaSpace/status/1760726397889466792?s=20 https://x.com/VardaSpace/status/1760726397889466792?s=20
- BryanLegend 3y agoThat's what a several miles per second wind looks like! The heat is not from the friction, but from the compression of the gasses.
- enderfusion 3y agoAll those little molecules trying to get out of the way.
- rbanffy 3y agoThey are screaming, first in infrared, then red, orange, white...
- enderfusion 3y agoThey were not expecting this....
- pfdietz 3y agoThey're so excited, and they just can't hide it.
- pfdietz 3y agoI often see that claim, but I don't like it. The implication is that the heating is like when one compresses air in a bicycle pump, the increase in temperature that comes from adiabatic (reversible, isentropic) compression of a gas. And some compression does occur, so there is some necessary heating from that source (as required by the second law). But entry heating is not reversible. It's fundamentally irreversible, in fact. The gas is going through a shock. Shocks fundamentally cause an increase in entropy as fast gas slams into slow gas over a region whose thickness is on the order of a mean free path of molecules in the gas. And, in fact, the increase in density of gas going through a shock approaches a limit (around 4, IIRC, for air) regardless of the Mach number. So at sufficiently high speed most of the heating is coming from dissipation at the shock (a process akin to friction), over and above the heating implied by adiabatic compression.
- imjonse 3y agoIs the bright body visible from 0:25 to 0:35 the Sun? It looks much brighter already at 4:04.
- enderfusion 3y agoThe moon!
- mholt 3y agoThis footage is amazing. And I love how the microphone just gave up as the plasma formed xD EDIT: As commenters noted, it fades out so it probably was edited in post.
- alias_neo 3y agoI was curious at this point; did the mic actually give up (it was working again later), or was it muted because of lots of noise?
- enderfusion 3y agoBut it came back later! Frankly we're all surprised and a little confused how much audio we got while at 500km altitude before reentry.
- mik3y 3y agoIt sounds like it indeed was a GoPro, neat! Were you not surprised to get video back, then? What steps were taken? I don't know much about Space Stuff but seems like even with shielding, you would expect off-the-shelf consumer hardware to fail somehow..
- enderfusion 3y agoHeavily modified. But it's the Gopro sensor and board.
- bohanker 3y agoHow interesting... the anacoustic zone apparently begins at about 160km altitude.
- pfdietz 3y agoWhat's the maximum voltage in a GoPro? In some ranges of air pressure, if the voltage is sufficiently high a discharge could occur, perhaps shorting out something temporarily.
- 3y ago
- spdustin 3y agoThe audio (in both videos) sounds like it was ring modulated. And later, cut out entirely. Is that an attempt to stretch audio that was sampled periodically from another system, or an artifact of the GoPro's own audio circuitry?
- enderfusion 3y agoEntirely from the Gopro internal mic
- ordu 3y agoCould video camera be damaged by a direct imaging of Sun?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mnw21cam 3y agoJust like from the surface of the Earth. The atmosphere doesn't really diminish the brightness that much. So, while you should be careful including the sun in a photo from a camera, it really depends on the focal length and aperture of the lens used. Lenses with long focal lengths will create a larger sun image on the sensor leading to greater heating. The camera should automatically shrink the aperture when the sun appears in frame to adjust the brightness, but if it doesn't and the aperture is sufficiently large then you could end up with enough heating on the sensor to damage it. With a very wide-angle lens like the one used for this video, it's not likely to be a problem.
- kragen 3y agothere are definitely video cameras that can, but a gopro (with, as mnw21cam pointed out, a wide-angle lens) probably isn't one of them—even in space with no air to cool the focal plane
- kragen 3y agofor people using non-medieval units of measure, √(GM/r) is a fairly precise approximation to circular orbital speed, and units(1) is good at calculating things like this: You have: (G earthmass / earthradius)**.5 You want: Definition: 7909.7861 m / s it was amusing when the sound cut out at 2'59" (sumerian units of measure). for a while i thought the microphone had been destroyed by the sound at that point
- enderfusion 3y agoI am ashamed, I misread the room.
- enderfusion 3y agoEverything in mission control is typically m/sec, we're not animals :P
- kragen 3y agowell i am, which is why unit conversion is difficult for me
- pfdietz 3y agoStatistically, it wouldn't be too surprising if at least one of you was a furry. :)
- kragen 3y agoprobably a lot of them; every high-tech field is full of furries also though the humans are animals, not stable configurations of plasma currents in the chromosphere or something
- coder543 3y agoSound came back later in the video, so I’m pretty sure they just turned the volume way down. The sound was probably very annoying for that period of time, but they actually wanted people to be able to enjoy the beauty of that scene.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoBeautiful, thank you for posting! I predict new reentry shaders being made for Kerbal Space Program by modders in short order.
- kraig911 3y agoThe mud on those shoes at the end man. Still impressive footage!
- pfdietz 3y agoIt's been rainy lately out west, I think. Kayaking in Death Valley! They needed it.
- taway789aaa6 3y agoI was very confused about the shoes. I was watching on low res (bad internet) and I thought it was some sort of weird ghillie suit! Thx
- SenHeng 3y agoI'm surprised it took only around 2-ish minutes from somewhere above the clouds to on the ground.
- thejohnconway 3y agoThere’s a cut at 5:10, after the parachute opens: https://youtu.be/qw4DseiPu7E?si=QZFAnKYfVnQc92TD&t=305 https://youtu.be/qw4DseiPu7E?si=QZFAnKYfVnQc92TD&t=305 There’s another cut earlier when still outside the atmosphere as well.
- SiempreViernes 3y agoYeah, I think it would have been nicer if they used wipes or some other more obvious transition when hey cut out bits. Some of the cuts you almost don't notice tricking you into thinking things happens much faster than they really did.
- enderfusion 3y agoFull 27min uncut video here. https://youtu.be/BWxl921rMgM?si=q50ewZw4ARRU-hG0 https://youtu.be/BWxl921rMgM?si=q50ewZw4ARRU-hG0
- next_xibalba 3y agoThis is definitely not dropping out of “hyperspace”. Title should be changed. Very cool video though.
- elliotbnvl 3y agoI mean it definitely looks like it.
- bennyp101 3y agoThat meringue got toasted! Pretty neat the way it went from crazy hyperspace to a gentle, peaceful floating in the air!
- krisoft 3y agoOn the other hand a reentering ICBM warhead (test) looks like from the ground as if the gods are angry with you and your general vicinity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a1acYZ93yc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a1acYZ93yc
- pfdietz 3y agoNotice the two that impacted at almost exactly the same spot, a few second apart (around 1:00). What precision!
- dylan604 3y agoYeah, that was the first thing that popped into my mind as well when I saw that. Horse shoes and hand grenades, and atomic weapons was what we always joked about being close enough
- krisoft 3y agoYeah. To understand why this is quite a flex: nearly no structure survives when they are directly hit with a nuclear weapon. The way hardened structures are designed is that the designers guestimate how big of a boom they have to survive and at what distance. They do this based on your intelligence sources of course. So let's say your spies are telling you that the enemy can deliver 60 kiloton device with 200m circular error probable (CEP). Then your engineers can calculate how likely is that your bunker/silo will survive that (and can do something like a counter attack.) And you build the number of silos you think you need based on that calculation. You put a lot of concrete and lot of work literally in the ground based on those numbers. And then suddenly your enemy just improves their guidance system and they drop (figuratively) such a video on you. That tends to cause jitters.
- ericbarrett 3y agoAwesome link. Reminds me that one of my biggest gripes with movies is that when they show meteors (or whatever) entering Earth, it's never at realistic speeds. They're always super slow and floaty, hovering in the sky to menacing effect. Great, that's the artist's choice. But the real thing is so much scarier, like this footage! And it's still a fraction of the speed of an interstellar object.
- Mistletoe 3y agohttps://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/vardas-drug-cooking-winnebago-will-be-remembered-as-a-space-pioneer/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/vardas-drug-cooking-wi...
- tra3 3y agoSo I have a question about the audio at the beginning of the video. How low is LEO and how much atmosphere is there? You know, the whole sci-fi movie trope with lasers making noise in space?
- bombcar 3y ago> This marks the first time a commercial company has landed a spacecraft on United States soil. I'm assuming SpaceX doesn't count somehow? Boosters have landed on soil for sure (well, technically on landing pads), but maybe they didn't become spacecraft.
- pfdietz 3y agoThose reentered from suborbital trajectories. If reaching space (> 100 km) was necessary, I think even amateur rocket people have achieved that.
- davedx 3y agoCome on LOL. Falcon 9 is an orbital booster that's landed dozens of times on US soil. Suggesting this spacecraft has achieved some kind of world first is totally ridiculous and diminishes the actual achievement.
- peeters 3y agoI mean sure, there's ambiguity around the word "spacecraft". But Falcon 9's booster isn't orbital, its payload is. So it might still be a first for an orbital spacecraft. The gravitational potential energy of a 100kg payload in 100km orbit is 98 MJ. The kinetic energy of a 100kg payload in 100km orbit is 3042 MJ, over 30x more. So surviving reentry from orbit is orders of magnitude more difficult than surviving a straight up/down shot. Now F9 boosters obviously have a horizontal velocity as well that they need to cancel out, but suborbital and orbital spacecrafts are very different beasts and it's absolutely noteworthy. It's the difference between surviving a car crash at 20 mph vs 95 mph. One is trivial, the other requires a heck of a lot of engineering.
- davedx 3y agoF9 landing is not trivial, and despite all the comments on this thread trying to back up the claim this is the “first commercial spacecraft to land on US soil” ludicrous.
- lawrenceyan 3y agoThe experiences of awakening astronauts get when they see Earth for the first time make sense to me now.
- xeromal 3y agoThis was incredible to me and I'm not even sure why. I was enthralled.
- moribvndvs 3y agoImmediately before touchdown, the camera rolls slightly before we hear and see it impact. Why is that?
- enderfusion 3y ago27min full uncut version. https://youtu.be/BWxl921rMgM?si=9lVkkMBd5pAw2hSv https://youtu.be/BWxl921rMgM?si=9lVkkMBd5pAw2hSv
- j-wags 3y agoThis is the second time Varda's been on my radar in the past year. First time was when their engineer Andrew McCalip livestreamed his replication attempt for LK-99 (using company equipment) just days after the initial announcement [1][2]. I'm not even remotely in the right field, but stuff like this makes me think Varda would be a cool place to work. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997821 [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/engineer-details-messy-lk-99-superconductor-fabrication-process https://www.tomshardware.com/news/engineer-details-messy-lk-...
- enderfusion 3y agoHehe, that was me. The hobbies do occasionally get out of control :P
- vertis 3y agoWhen the hobbies become indistinguishable from the job. Congrats on the reentry.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diimdeep 3y agoThis is some serious Deep tech [1] technology, not your average fully remote SAAS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_tech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_tech
- davidw 3y agoCan anyone post a timestamp?
- SushiHippie 3y ago2:44
- Centigonal 3y agoI have a friend who's at Varda. They manufacture space drugs. SPACE DRUGS!! https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20240222/hiv-drugs-manufactured-in-space-return-to-earth https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20240222/hiv-...
- clarle 3y agoOut of curiosity, what's the benefit of pharmaceuticals manufacturing in space? Is there a benefit to manufacturing drugs in low gravity environments, or is it more of an experiment to see if it's feasible, in a future where more people might be living in space?
- ender341341 3y agoI believe last I read about it, some drugs are formed as crystals, and being in 0g (or free fall if your pedantic) meant the formed crystals were much bigger or easier to actually form, can't remember which, the specific drug is related to HIV medications
- cyberax 3y agoPerfect crystals. Also, the proof-of-concept drug was ritonavir, and it's nearly impossible to consistently grow large crystals of it on Earth. All of the labs that work with ritonavir are contaminated by a more stable form ("polymorph") that rapidly converts any ritonavir crystals into a less-useful form.
- throwup238 3y ago> All of the labs that work with ritonavir are contaminated by a more stable form ("polymorph") that rapidly converts any ritonavir crystals into a less-useful form. The incredible case of the disappearing polymorphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorphs It's an actual virulent molecule!
- boffinAudio 3y ago
- avalys 3y agoWhat are the "sparklies"? They look like small particles burning up but it's not clear why they're only luminous so briefly within the frame of the video.
- Valid3840 3y agoThis answer and the following children answers will answer your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39539147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39539147 I didn't know what to ctrl+f to find my answer, settled with "sparks" and then "flashes".
- DonnyV 3y ago"Landing on the beach Do Do Do Do!"
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoWhat ITAR restrictions do you have for employment?
- OldHunter69X 3y agoHelldiver reporting for duty!
- thebiglebrewski 3y agoAre the points of light when it first separates Starlink/other satellites moving around up there, or stars?
- dylan604 3y agothey could be much smaller and much closer from debris from the craft itself. perspective at that altitude is tricky
- a_gnostic 3y agoWhat version of Reentry Particle Effect did you use for this KSP install?
- hasoleju 3y agoOnly a handful of minutes from a position in space where you can see the whole earth to a small spot in the desert of Utah. Where you see the feet of a human walking towards you. Amazing what is achievable with the tech of today. Space is not that far away after all. Still very odd to see the two scenes described above in a short video on YouTube. Having the human walk towards the camera has a tremendous effect. It's something everyone can relate to and it puts a great context to all the scenes that are shown in the video before that.
- mastazi 3y agoJust a heads up that the video linked above has been cut, the full length video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWxl921rMgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWxl921rMgM What you said is still valid though, since the full video is not much longer.
- enderfusion 3y agoYeah sorry, grabbed the wrong link initially.
- whats_a_quasar 3y agoIf you live in San Francisco you're closer to LEO than you are to Los Angeles. Probably also helps that 17,000 mph is really freaking fast.
- elasker 3y agoYea, that's something we have to explain to folks quite a bit working at/on Varda; space feels further away than it really is because of how inaccessible it has historically been; really due to cost, but also cadence of launch in near equal measures. Now that both of those barriers have fallen with the Falcon 9, and will continue to do so with Starship, that perception of inaccessibility will slowly change...or I hope it does/I'm working really hard (with some decent progress) to make that true.
- EnigmaFlare 3y agoYou can't see the whole earth (most of one hemisphere) from LEO, only a circle about 1000 km in diameter, which is about the size of Texas or twice the width of Utah. That doesn't stop it being amazing though! There's also a cut before the person appears, so it could have sat waiting much longer than a few minutes.
- aledalgrande 3y agoQuestion, that might be obvious to many but not to me: isn't space supposed to be empty? How is the mic picking up noise (= sound) just after detaching from the other module?
- SushiHippie 3y agoI'd say vibrations of the capsule which shake the camera, which then shakes the diaphragm/membrane of the microphone, and maybe electromagnetic inferences
- qup 3y agoIf it's a go pro in an airtight housing, it has that air to make the mic work normally
- abeppu 3y agoI was confused by the fact that it started off with a little sound, and then there was a crescendo, and then it cut off to silence at about the 3 minute mark ... and then around the 4 minute mark sound ramps back up. Was that artificially muted out because that section would have been too loud?
- SushiHippie 3y agoFrom OP: > Nope, all audio was straight from the camera, no gain adjustment or muting. Something odd happened with the diaphragm in the mic I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39546439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39546439
- klohto 3y agoI don’t know if Andrew is still answering, but how does it work with calculations for reentry? It’s basically ballistic downward, how do you make sure you won’t hit anything on your way down over many layers?
- elasker 3y agoEric here from Varda. Short answer: lots of math. But really, that's the job of lots of folks over here, but primarily comes from our GNC and Hypersonic/Analysis teams. Folks like my colleagues Marat Kulakhmetov
- Plasmoid 3y agoWhat I found interesting is the sun is actually white in this camera feed instead of the usual yellow we associated with it.
- SushiHippie 3y agoYeah, the sun is actually white! It's a big star, after all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Sunlight_and_neutrinos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Sunlight_and_neutrinos > The Sun emits light across the visible spectrum, so its color is white, [...], when viewed from space or when the Sun is high in the sky. > When the Sun is very low in the sky, atmospheric scattering renders the Sun yellow, red, orange, or magenta, and in rare occasions even green or blue. > Despite its typical whiteness [...], some cultures mentally picture the Sun as yellow and some even red; the reasons for this are cultural and exact ones are the subject of debate.
- bboygravity 3y agoThat last sentence about the color of the sun being cultural is weird to me. The sun simply looks very different depending on where you are on earth. Example (from experience/memory): the sun looks very orange/red during a Norwegian winter sunrise for like an hour or so. Around the equator the sun is up and white within minutes.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoIt's a GoPro doing automatic white balance.
- TheRealNGenius 3y ago[dead]
- eob 3y agoSurprising to see another spacecraft at 1:30
- MIT_Hacker 3y agothat's the spacecraft that dropped us off!
- MIT_Hacker 3y agooh god I need to change my HN username
- everfrustrated 3y agoRocketlab Photon?
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoKenton?
- kentonv 3y agoNope, not me.