<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" NASA has been launching space (and air!) bound vehicles since 1958, which means, of course, they&amp;#039;ve been crashing them that long too. But, you know, in the name of science. Now, this roundup video from NASA Langley brings you 50 glorious years\u00A0of dropping things on the ground to see what happens, ever since they started testing in 1965. This has it all: early stage moon landers, crashtest dummies, experimental airplanes, helicopters, heat shields, whatever. If it has a chance of landing somewhere, NASA Langley will crash it somewhere to make sure it shatters into as few pieces as possible. One of the most remarkable things is, conversely, the most boring thing to actually watch: the space capsules that are sturdy enough to be virtually unaffected by their fall. But then, everyone who fell to Earth in Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo made it out ok, so the capsules must have been doing something right.\u00A0 The next generation capsule, the Orion, will get a parachute test this week, dropping from a high altitude and deploying the parachutes in such a way to test what happens if they malfunction. Of course, this wouldn&amp;#039;t be possible without rigorous testing, which is both in the video below and explored a little more in-depth here.\u00A0        "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17043/nasa-crashing-video/>