It's a gorgeous clip.
Ultimate Egg Drop
Space startup Varda Space Industries has shared a gorgeous video of one of its space capsules blasting through the Earth's atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound.
At first, the clip shows the capsule peacefully floating in outer space, with glinting stars far in the distance. At one point, you can even see the rocket that delivered into space floating by.
As it reenters our planet's atmosphere, lit-up particles start racing by, with magenta hues giving way to orange and red, as the capsule starts heating up. Finally, the orange glow is replaced by the recognizable blue aura blanketing the Earth's surface below, with the spacecraft dipping into lush cloud cover.
It's a gorgeous video that could've been yanked straight out of a sci-fi flick — without any rendering needed, as Varda promises.
Reentry Hard
The video shows the end of an eight-month-long trip through space, far longer than the roughly one-month mission that was initially planned.
The company's three-feet-across W-1 spacecraft, which was launched on a Rocket Lab Photon spacecraft in June, was designed to grow crystals of an antiviral drug in a microgravity environment.
According to the company's website, the "benefits primarily stem from the lack of convection and sedimentation forces, as well as the ability to form more perfect structures due to the absence of gravitational stresses."
But the company's mission hit a huge snag in September when neither the US Air Force nor the Federal Aviation Administration agreed to clear the orbital production facility for a return back to Earth.
Fortunately, in an October update, the company announced that "our spacecraft is still healthy across all systems," despite being stuck in space far longer than expected.
Earlier this month, the FAA finally issued the reentry permit, paving the way for last week's landing.
More on Varda: Drug Manufacturing Spacecraft Finally Cleared to Return to Earth
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