Why can’t the space shuttle just go slow enough to not be heated up by friction with earths atmosphere on re-entry?
In: 5
It’s essentially in a directed free fall, it can’t like ‘brake’ there’s no ‘reverse’ on the thrusters and stuff.
It’s in space before re-entry so there’s nothing slowing it down, it can only really start to slow down as it enters the atmosphere.
In order to orbit Earth it’s gotta be going close to Mach 25, and there’s just no way to slow that down enough in open space before you’d fall into the atmosphere anyway, so it tries to slow down a lot in the upper atmosphere as it can, but its ability to slow down is proportional to the density of the air, and it’s ability to steer in very thin air is much less.
So it just tries to take a really thin angle and ease in as much as possible.
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