I’ll bet that there is someone at Rocket Lab who said, “We thought we wouldn’t see that Photon ever again.” I said that to a friend of mine who had worked on Intelsat 901 when MEV 1 took photographs of it ( https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/02/26/photos-servicing-spacecraft-approaches-intelsat-satellite-high-above-earth/ https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/northrop-grummans-mev-2-successfully-completes-docking-to-commercial-satellite/#comment-1123992 ).

Thank you for the link. It helps to remind us that Rocket Lab provides services to its customers that are new to space operations so that they don’t have to have their own experts in the areas that Rocket Lab can cover.

Something else I noticed was that the edge beyond the window was browned during reentry, like the meringue on a lemon meringue pie. Rats. Now I’m craving pie, and it is a week until pi day.

Now we know what all those sci-fi folks experience on the way from orbit to surface. The Shuttle re-entry videos I’ve seen are through the windshield; this is more of a passenger view. Easy to imagine the relief at getting through the frictional part of re-entry; like breaking through the clouds and seeing the airport. Made it.

Varda would have had to have pre-calculated altitude and speed over time, and from those you could derive G’s, presumably to keep heating and stress within some constraints.

So even if all that wasn’t telemetered in real time, it could be recreated. Accurately? Well, it hit the target!