Word: frictioned
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...down with parachutes," says one U.S. scientist. "Ideally, we will want to land the full vehicle and its occupants, re-use the vehicle for other flights." Probable method: orbital reentry. Rather than plunge directly into earth's atmosphere and risk crushing G forces or a fiery disintegration from friction, a spaceship would ease into a wide orbit around the earth, cut its speed with retrorockets, and circle slowly to a landing. Orbital reentry also would permit the space pilot to pick out a precise landing point...
Stable Platform. In actual operation, gyroscopes fall short of the ideal. They have trouble with friction and are thus inclined to misbehave. But as developed by Draper and his Instrumentation Laboratory, gyroscopes can keep a "stabilized platform" about as level as if it had no connection with the roaring missile that is carrying it aloft...
...must have gone wrong. The way to bring a satellite, manned or unmanned, down to the atmosphere is to fire a forward-pointing retrorocket to reduce its speed. If this is done properly, the satellite will curve down into the denser air, where it will be slowed further by friction. If the retrorocket is fired in the wrong direction, it will speed the satellite up and put it on an orbit with a higher apogee. The U.S. Air Force Discoverer satellite program has suffered from just such aiming errors...
...piecing together radar and telemetry data, film sequences and fragments of wreckage dipped from the shallow waters off the cape, missilemen managed to figure out what went wrong: the loft. long fiber glass "nose fairing" that was supposed to protect the third stage and payload from air friction and buffeting in the upper atmosphere fell off prematurely, after 40 seconds instead of the programed 4½ minutes. Then the fierce drag of the atmosphere wrenched the payload-carrying third stage loose, made the second stage malfunction...
...heat concentrated on rather small areas. The beauty of Pyrographite is that it conducts heat away from these danger points as fast as copper can, but it does not permit nearly as much heat to pass through it. A Pyrographite nose cone, for instance, spreads the heat of air friction over a large area and permits it to be radiated harmlessly away, but it does not let heat strike through the cone and damage the sensitive instruments or warhead inside...