apollo 13

What do you want to know? You had three guys, about half dead, hand guiding a sheet metal shack traveling at 200,000 miles a hour through the thick air of the outer atmosphere and down, down, down onto the blue, blue ocean. One hundred and fifty million American yelled in relief.


Joe(they were the luckiest s o b s in the world)Nation

how did friction effect it???

Less than you would think.

There are frictional effects, of course, but the primary cause of heating is convection.

The reason the front of the spacecraft is fairly blunt is to create a compression wave. Basically, the craft shoves the air ahead of it. The air heats as it is compressed, and this heat is transferred to the spacecraft the same way an oven transfers heat to a roast.

WOW thanx

The same way it does the shuttle. When you hit dense air at 17,000 to 20,000 mph things get hot---really hot. The capsules had what was known as an ablation layer---that is this machined barrier insulated the capsules inhabitants by vaporizing thus creating a vapor thermal barrier. Hopefully the ablation layer lasted long enough to slow the capsule down (also friction, kinda, but in this case the slowing effect is known as drag).

The shuttle has something else that does the same function as the capsule ablation layer. That is the tiles on the leading edges. These are engineered ceramic tiles that can withstand the heating of reentry (friction heating) with minimal ablation but still insulate the shuttle airframe. The shuttle is also slowed by friction (drag) but unlike the capsules of Apollo, the shuttle is a lifting body and lands like an un-powered airplane.

Rap