1 of the photos which will define 2021. Try to imagine yourself as a paying passenger during EDL. You're in a lone ship descending towards a completely deserted planet, through a completely deserted atmosphere with no other aircraft or living beings in it. You have a view through a window of the red pitted horizon you've seen for your entire life in photos, but can't see where you're going & only have situational awareness from a screen with a 3D model of the strange planet. 

No-one else in the universe knows what's happening. Panicking humans are watching what happened to you 11 minutes ago, back on Earth but they can't see what's happening now. You wonder why you paid your entire net worth to take so much risk, knowing you have a 1 in 2 chance of not being around in 7 minutes.  You & the other 100 passengers in the room were 1 of the majority of men who never had a family, didn't leave anything behind on Earth & wanted to send your genome out with a bang, just not on impact.  Although some women don't have anything to leave behind on Earth, social pressure made women in this position tend to not be physically able to survive the G forces & modern cultures don't include women who take risks.  You are among a crew of just old men.

The sound of air rushing by the fuselage returns & the ship assumes the familiar sound of an airplane, as you hit the lower atmosphere.  It's a sound you haven't heard since liftoff, 6 months ago.

Your ship has a vastly simpler landing sequence than the Mars probes of old.  Instead of 70 pyrotecnic events, a heat shield separation, backshell separation, ballast separation, cables, & a skycrane, the magic of technological progress has simplified your journey to just 3 engines.  As long as the 3 engines start, the thing flips over & lands in exactly the same 1 piece that it was when it left Earth.  

The last 3000 ft were always the shortest, when you watched the landings on Earth.  It always hit 3000ft & suddenly was on the ground, in 1 form or another.  Sitting in the ship, the last 3000ft take forever.  

Then, the scene you watched hundreds of times before appears through the window.  Before you even notice the engines starting, the ship is quickly flipping over to point the engines down, but you're seeing it from on the ship rather than the ground & feeling the angular acceleration push out of your seat.  Then the thrust from the engines hits your rear end, a final burst of deceleration to match the monster deceleration you experienced 10 miles ago.  With too little time to contemplate whether all 3 lit, whether the header tanks had enough pressure, whether 1 sputtered out.  You're already on the ground or at least in a parallel universe where the landing was successful.