How To Fall To Earth (Without Burning Up)

Rockets are built to slice cleanly through the atmosphere on the way up. Coming home, it turns out, requires... not turning into a fireball before a bellyflop

When Space Shuttles reenter Earth’s atmosphere at 17,000 miles per hour, they don’t dive nose first. Instead they turn broadside to the atmosphere, deliberately creating more drag, more friction, more heat. At those speeds, oncoming air compresses into a shockwave hotter than molten lava.

In this episode of Field Notes, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the strange physics of coming home. Why is leaving Earth easier than returning to it? And what does a small, almost empty black tile reveal about the problem of meeting the world at 17,000 miles per hour?

Along the way, they revisit controversial experiments in human fear, calculate which superhero power would bankrupt you in calories, and reflect on the thin boundary between surface and survival.

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