Jesse Rogerson

You put a very special material on the front of your spacecraft.

That's the part that's shocking the air.

And that material that you use is, there's been a variety of ones that's been used.

There's been ceramics used, carbon fibers.

They're using silicate fibers.

And the idea is to find a way to dissipate the heat.

And they're also ablative.

which means that they're designed to, the materials are designed to sort of peel away as they burn up.

They char, basically.

They take the heat and they do a chemical reaction.

Delicious.

So that really sheds a lot of the velocity.

And once they get through that, then they can use parachutes and come down nice and safely.

Or in the case of the shuttles years ago, they turned the thing into an airplane and they glided down, right?

So there's that moment, that few minutes,

where you're going through 5,000, 6,000, 7 degrees Celsius, 7,000 degrees Celsius, and you're shocking the gas, it turns into a plasma, which a plasma is not a regular gas.

It's a gas that's been ionized.

All the electrons have been stripped away.

And that interrupts communication.

So you can't talk to these astronauts as they're literally falling back to Earth.