031: Rockets and the Challenges of Space Travel with Dr. Vanstone

Dr. Leon Vanstone is an aerodynamic engineer and a real life rocket scientist.  Travelling really fast through the atmosphere generates a lot of heat due to friction from the air. Leon’s work looks at how to stop things that do this from melting. It’s pretty hard to travel fast enough to melt something unless you drop the object from space and so this problem usually only applies to rockets and re-entry vehicles.  Leon discusses some of these challenges and tells us a bit more about orbital travel.