I just saw a link to an article about the Japanese designing wooden satellites so they burn up on reentry and reduce space junk, and it made me wonder how they get out of the earth’s atmosphere without being destroyed.
In: Physics
Adding to what others have posted here with one more fact:
Anything that enters the atmosphere will burn up if traveling sufficiently fast because of friction with the air right. As anything comes into the atmosphere from outer space it’s entering higher and higher densities of air so it starts to burn up due to the amount of air it’s encountering frictional force with.
Conversely rockets that are being shot up are slower than re-entry objects when they’re beginning to shoot up so the dense columns of air they’re rubbing against at the start don’t cause a burn. If they were traveling fast right out the gate this wouldn’t be the case. As they continue to get faster they’re already higher up in the atmosphere where there’s less air to encounter frictional forces with, so there’s little or no burning.
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