Why can’t the space shuttle just go slow enough to not be heated up by friction with earths atmosphere on re-entry?

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Why can’t the space shuttle just go slow enough to not be heated up by friction with earths atmosphere on re-entry?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Putting some numbers to other peoples posts – Orbital Velocity in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), is ~9 kilometers per sec which is around the equivalent of Mach 25. The space shuttle orbiter had a maximum mass w/payload of around 110,000kg, roughly the same mass as a small american house. This is a an extremely heavy object moving at 10 times the speed of a Barrett .50 Caliber bullet, it is impossible to “just slow down” without external help.

At launch fully fulled, it weighed 2,030,000 kg of which ~90% was just fuel to get it up to Mach 25 so it can stay in orbit. There’s no physical way that the shuttle could carry an appreciable fraction of that to orbit. It’s much easier to use the “free” drag from slamming into the atmosphere to slow down – thus why every spacecraft that has landed on a body with an atmosphere has done that.

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