Splashdown was text book.

 

 

I remember seeing splashdowns like that in the 70's .

 

Splash down was on the 50th anniversary of the last Apollo landing on the moon.

Too long. On the one hand, sure. Fifty years plus between lunar missions is just too long. On the other, it probably took close to that for science to fully evaluate all the raw information from the Apollo program.

 

We got so used to seeing a shuttle land from return flight, seeing them back to using splash landings is funny to see, probably much safer and less expensive ?

 

watching the news tonight, they go from 19k miles per hour down to 20 mph at splashdown in the capsule. It is subjected to 5000 degrees temperature on re-entry. Tough conditions.

 

My mind hurts when I start calculating the G-loading during the deceleration and the duration as well.