The warmer side of (space capsule) cool

Gemini 9A, post-descent
Merritt Island, FL
December 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

A not-so-funny thing happens to things when they slam into the Earth's atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound: They burn to a crisp. So spacecraft designers use every trick available to them to keep that from happening.

Ablative heat shields - like the ones found on the blunt ends of early U.S. capsules like the Gemini 9A you see here - are designed to literally disintegrate as the vehicle descends deeper into the ever-thicker air. That carries away excess heat and keeps the inside as cool as a cucumber.

The space shuttle orbiters used more sophisticated non-ablative materials - together they formed the thermal protection system, or TPS - that, along with a bunch of other technologies, allowed these winged wonders to be reused. Old-style or new, the Columbia accident proved just how critical these technologies are, and just how lethal the high-speed, high-altitude regime in which they operate can be when they fail.

So getting up close and personal with the business end of a capsule that NASA legends Gene Cernan (later Apollo 10 & 17) and Tom Stafford (later Apollo 10 & ASTP, and instrumental developer of the F-117 Nighthawk and B-2 Spirit) flew in before I was even born was quite the rush, and I lingered over the heat-scarred heat shield for a while. Plasma can do some incredible things to human-made objects, and it's not a bad thing for any of us to see it first-hand.

It's weird how that works. You can study the physics and the engineering, and understand at a detail level how the shape of a vehicle and the materials used to build it can keep its occupants safe amid the harshest environments ever encountered by humanity. But until you can stand Right There, you'll never appreciate just what an achievement - even 53-plus years later - it was, and is.

Perhaps that's a lesson for the Digital Age, when we seem to think experiencing something on-screen is sufficient. Not always.

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