How to Land the Space Shuttle... from Space

Nov 7, 2016
NOT AN ASTRONAUT; NO AFFILIATION WITH NASA. I was dressed up for Halloween. Presented on October 31st, 2016 at Stack Overflow’s Remote Meetup in Philadelphia. #PhillyCheeseStack

If you want to try landing the shuttle for yourself for fun, try F-Sim http://www.f-sim.com/ (I have no affiliation... just a fan).

Sorry about the autofocus (we disabled it in later talks). Me running around on stage didn't help. As always, send complaints to Steve.

If you're interested in more details on reentry and landing, I also wrote an answer on Stack Exchange Aviation: http://aviation.stackexchange.com/que...

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This was one of nine "Tiny Talks" given over three days at the meetup. Every year, employees submit Tiny Talk ideas on a wide range of topics (some completely random and not company-related at all, like this one) and we vote on which ones we want to hear. So, thank you to my coworkers for voting me in.

Original proposal description I submitted for this talk:

Let's say you're traveling at about 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 km/h) in low earth orbit, your main engines are out of fuel, and it's your job to guide the spaceship through a fiery re-entry without burning up or skipping out of the atmosphere, navigate to your landing site, and arrive with just enough energy to make an unpowered landing on a runway which is halfway around the planet from where you started. And, of course, either you succeed on your first try, or everyone dies. So, no pressure…. In this talk, I'll show you how space shuttle designers, pilots, and autopilots managed to do just that.

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All real-life photos and videos (except the last slide) were produced by NASA. Everything that looks hand-drawn was done by me on a Wacom Intuos Pro tablet in ArtRage. Animations were done in After Effects. Between the concept, outline, script, artwork, animations, rehearsals, and editing, I spent somewhere around 200 hours over two months working on it. Very little time was spent researching. In case it wasn't obvious, I've been more than a little obsessed with the topic for years now.