Video Throughput: Armageddon

Michael Cain says:

Interesting, as always :^)

Production nitpick: inconsistent audio levels. Rather than constantly fiddle with my computer’s volume level, or decide between inaudible movie clips vs you “yelling” at me, I finally downloaded the whole thing and played it with VLC and its dynamic range compression on max.

Where I think you’re wrong: when you describe the Shuttle returning to Earth at 22,000 mph as a problem. Apollo capsules, and the Orion capsule tentatively/optimistically scheduled for launch next month, had/will have final return velocities right at 24,000 mph. To borrow from Heinlein:

But no matter how he threw them, final velocity at Terra would be close to Terra’s escape speed, near enough eleven kilometers per second as to make no difference. That terrible speed results from gravity well shaped by Terra’s mass, eighty times that of Luna, and made no real difference whether Mike pushed a missile gently over well curb or flipped it briskly. Was not muscle that counted but great depth of that well.

As I recall, Apollo had to hit the atmosphere at a very precise angle: too shallow and they would skip off, too steep and they would burn up. The description I remember is “like hitting a dime with a rifle at a range of a mile.” The Shuttles might not have been built for that kind of stress, although they did reenter from an orbital speed around 17,000 mph. All sorts of orbital mechanics complications when you’re coming in from far out, of course, but there’s a reason the typical impacter has a terminal velocity around 25,000 mph.Report