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Vikki McDonough
Scott Manley
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Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "" video.
9:25 - Why couldn't they make multiple aerobraking passes through the extreme upper atmosphere to bleed off speed before the final reentry? Since the shuttle's heatshield wasn't ablative, it was peak-heat-flux-limited rather than total-heat-absorbed-limited, so it should have been possible to spread out the deceleration over several aerobraking passes rather than reentering directly from a lunar return.
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@Andrew-Kerr It would be literally impossible for skipping off the atmosphere on a lunar return trajectory to send the shuttle into deep space; at worst, it would have ended up on an elliptical orbit that would still intersect the atmosphere on the next pass, and would still eventually have braked down to a low orbit. When you're returning from the moon, you've already been captured into Earth orbit (given that the Moon is in Earth orbit).
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2:01 - Is the bottom of the ET supposed to be on fire?
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@Xatzimi Which still seems like something that you really really would not want right up against a thin layer of friable, flammable insulation covering a huge tank of extremely-flammable liquid hydrogen.
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