What would it be like to fall back into the earth’s atmosphere in the spacecraft at 20 thousand miles per-hour? Well NASA have recoded the whole experience!
The video here is of Orion’s capsule entering earth’s atmosphere, it was recorded in its small window and for those afraid of heights look away!
The video records around 10 minutes of the re-entry of the spacecraft, at the start the craft is falling at the 20 thousand miles per hour mark on the Kármán line – which is the last point of the earth’s atmosphere before you hit the vacuum. However it is still thick enough with partials to heat the ship up to thousands of degrees.
What you can see it the super-heated plasma being absorbed by the ships outer hull, as the ship comes into back to earth, the different colours you see is the plasma getting hotter (around 2,200 Celsius or 4000 Fahrenheit), until the drag of the atmosphere and the energy being lost by friction slows the re-entry to hypersonic speeds (around mark 5 and above) which are 1701.45 mph +.