What you're seeing
Orion is returning from the Moon at 11 km/s — Mach 32. It has to hit Earth's atmosphere at exactly the right angle.
The green band on Earth's edge is the reentry corridor. That's the target after a 1.6 million kilometre round trip.
- Too shallow — Orion skims the top of the atmosphere and bounces back into space. Like skipping a stone on water — except the stone never comes back.
- Too steep — Orion plunges in too fast. The heating overwhelms the heat shield. It burns up.
- Just right — Orion enters, decelerates, survives the heat, deploys parachutes, and splashes down in the Pacific.
Artemis II: Orion uses a technique called "skip reentry" — it deliberately bounces off the atmosphere once, then re-enters for the final descent. This spreads the deceleration over a longer time, reducing the g-forces on the crew from a brutal 8g to a manageable 4g. The heat shield still reaches 2,800°C — half the temperature of the Sun's surface.