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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Rocket fuel is very heavy. In order to slow down enough to prevent that heating, you need a lot of extra fuel to slow yourself through the descent through the atmosphere until the atmosphere is thick enough to keep you from moving fast enough that heat becomes a problem. Every pound of fuel a ship takes into orbit, it needs about 10x that much fuel to get it there. Using the atmosphere to slow the descent means we aren’t using fuel to do it, so it save a lot of cost and gives us more space to work with payloads. Dealing with the heat of reentry isn’t that big of a deal by comparison
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