Fleming's job was to snag the Genesis capsule by its rectangular parachute, called a parafoil, and lower it carefully to the ground to ensure the tiles were not damaged. He spent much of last week chasing the Batmobile through the streets of Chicago during the filming of "Batman 4," but he regarded the Genesis job as highly demanding because of the lack of visual reference points at high altitude.
The capsule hit its "keyhole" in Earth's atmosphere about 410,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean shortly before noon. At that point it was a fireball traveling at 24,861 mph -- with energy "like a 4.5 million-pound freight train traveling at 80 miles per hour" -- said Lockheed Martin's Bob Corwin, the capsule recovery team chief, in a briefing for reporters Tuesday.
In an artist's rendering, Genesis's parachute releases properly, allowing a helicopter crew to snare the craft.
(NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory via Reuters)
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_____Genesis Crashes_____
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Video: NASA's Genesis space capsule crash landed after its Parachutes failed to deploy.
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At 11:58 a.m., cameras picked up the capsule as it crossed into U.S. airspace over northwest Oregon and passed over Idaho at 200,000 feet. Premature applause broke out in mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
At this point, the remaining concerns were the two parachutes, a "drogue" designed to deploy at 108,000 feet to stabilize the capsule as it slowed in the upper atmosphere and the parafoil that was to unfurl at 22,000 feet. Fleming was poised to intercept the capsule and snatch the parafoil with an 18.5-foot gaff.
There was nothing to do but watch: "We had gone through each critical item and came to a conclusion that the thing ought to work," said Don Sevilla, leader of the payload recovery team. Once the final approach began, there was no way to tune or test the reentry mechanisms, he said.
As the capsule fell through the high atmosphere, it flickered oddly in the sun, and when it dropped lower, television viewers could see that it was tumbling because the drogue had not deployed, possibly because battery current had not exploded the mortar charge to release it.
With the Genesis team watching in silence, Genesis smacked into the landing zone edge first, sinking into the desert and coming to rest at a 10-degree angle from the perpendicular.
"I've been working on this project longer than anyone," said Genesis manager Don Sweetnam, who joined the team in 1997. "It's a difficult moment."
