Kind of a rough landing on Mission: Space, but we made it OK... [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
Ya'know... as an aviation/space geek, that gliding sequence annoys me. The motion is wrong. I won't go into details, I know how much know it all types like me annoy the rest of humanity... Although that's partially because I'm tall, and with the optics they have for the viewscreens, that is the fresnel lens that makes the screen appear larger than it is, being taller than the design height means that you're looking down and all the motion seems wrong anyway. I once ducked down and had this moment of realization when I realized "oh, so they didn't mean to have me staring down at the Earth when we're supposed to be accelerating out of Earth orbit". The first few times I got the end part after the landing I was looking over the instrument panel, looking for reaction thruster controls. They have so many switches I figured one would be there, but I don't think I've ever found a simple RCS enable switch. See.. pulling up alone wouldn't be useful if the thing was a glider and in an aerodynamic configuration. It would be more efficient to use aerodynamic control surfaces like normal airplanes do. You'd have to turn the reaction control system back on first, and THEN pull up. I DO have reflexes to do that. Needless to say when I first rode it I demanded that I got the pilot position.
