NASA BEGINS WATER LANDING TESTING

A 22,000-pound Orion test article is dropped into the Hydro Impact Basin at the Landing and Impact Research Facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia on July 12, 2011. The drop was the first in a series of water-impact tests conducted by NASA to provide high-fidelity data of the forces that the Orion spacecraft structure and its astronaut crew would experience during landing, helping to protect the crew and informing future designs. Part of Batch image transfer from Flickr.