Status Updates From Coming Home: Reentry and Re...

NASA really wanted a space plane. Really badly. Prior to the Soviets beating them getting a man into space they were focusing on X-15, DynaSoar and the like. They only grudgingly took capsules from the nuclear weapons program. Then Apollo was supposed to be a space plane, and Mercury was supposed to have a paraglider or parasail, and they were desperate to make that work. The book cites NASA’s aerodynamic heritage.

Also didn’t know that the first nuclear warheads and the first two Mercury capsules (flown on Redstone rockets) used a Beryllium heat sink and the later Mercury capsules and nuclear warheads used ablative heat shields.

NASA really wanted spaceplanes and I infer from this that they would’ve gone that route if it hadn’t been for a Soviet manned flight. A space plane would’ve worked on Titan, but not Redstone or Atlas. They tried again for Apollo but again got rushed to put something up quickly. Blunt body reentry was first developed for nuclear warheads, and ablative shields too.