Things You Thought You Knew – Billionaires in Space
StarTalk Radio
00:00
You Don't Need Heat Shields, You Dont Need Onion Layers
When you're in orbit, you don't need rockets to sustain orbit. You just duck every time you come past Isaac Newton's head. But how about the very high speeds that you have? That's kinetic energy. You got to dissipate that somehow. We did a whole show on heat shields. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Onion layers. Come off. Good memory check. So you you you ablate the heat shield. This eats up your kinetic energy that you had for going 17,500 miles an hour. Okay. Atmospheric brakes, brakes is arrow breaking is exactly what it is. And by the way, I like that movie. Thanks for ruining that for me.
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