In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
...using body lift to shape the path and hold the capsule
down in the atmosphere until it had lost enough speed that it wasn't going
to skip back out.

Which brings up the question: What would happen if it did skip off the
atmosphere?
Does it go into some odd orbit around Earth, or does it go clean out of
orbit and into solar orbit?

Yes. :-)

If I recall correctly, under the right/wrong conditions, it was barely
possible for a very shallow skip to end up in solar orbit. Orbits with
apogee near the Moon are not that strongly bound to Earth, and can end up
escaping when the three-body dynamics work out just so.

Far more likely, though, given that there would be *some* loss of energy
even in a skip, was a high elliptical orbit around Earth. Typically this
would encounter the atmosphere again, but long after the CM's consumables
were exhausted, so the difference wasn't too significant to the crew. :-)
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