Why things easily leave earths atmosphere but burn up while re-entering the same atmosphere

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Why things easily leave earths atmosphere but burn up while re-entering the same atmosphere

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Rockets go most straight up until they are out of the atmosphere and then accelerate to get to orbital velocity, so they aren’t going very fast when they go through the atmosphere.

Coming back you need to deal with orbital velocity, which is much much faster, and the amount of energy is proportional to the square of the velocity.

The velocity when it goes out of the atmosphere is around 1000 meters per second, while orbital velocity is around 7500 meters per second. That means the energy is about 50 times higher.

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