Drag here is a bit high, and it eventually caught up with me later on. I'm gonna have to do a roll reversal soon,
As roll reversals happen at slower speeds they become less tricky as more control authority is attained from increasing dynamic
pressure (currently 292 psf), roll angles become smaller, sideslip in sharp banks become more noticable, and it becomes impossible
to exit the atmosphere without applying power, even on purpose. In short, your ship is turning more and more into an
gliding aircraft rather than a controlled meteor.
In the Delta Glider, this transistion is gradual, but obvious. The ship's sink rates will go up to maintain the
constant drag gradually as she need the thicker air at lower speeds. She wants to actually turn rather than "just
crossrange." The reason is that as speed goes down, it becomes easier and easier to affect direction. Any driver's
safety course will allude to the turning formula v^2/r, sometimes without realizing it. A turn of the same radius require's
twice as much directional accelleration with each 40% increase in speed...a turn at twice the speed is four times as forceful.
In the Delta Glider, this is happening in reverse. With each 40% drop in speed, and from 5 miles a second, there's obviously
a lot of speed to drop, she wants to turn nearly twice as tight. I say nearly because Delta Glider's L/D ratio is dropping
as she goes down to the transonic region.
In the transition phase, the angle-of-attack continues to ramp down, reaching about 14 degrees as
the Orbiter reaches the Terminal Area Energy Management (TAEM) interface, at approximately 83,000 feet [25,300km] altitude,
2,500 fps (1,700 mph) [760m/s; about Mach 2.5], and 69 miles [111km] from the runway. Control is then transfer to TAEM
guidance.
(Capitalization added to what TAEM stands for.)
SpaceShipOne makes its transition extremely obvious by using a high-drag, low-lift dynamically stable "shuttlecock mode"
by tipping its collossal elevons and fins up. The transition from entry is marked by SpaceShipOne folding these huge
surfaces back to their normal flight positions.
On ballistic spacecraft, this transition is marked by parachute deployment. Generally no matter what type of ship
you fly, the transition happens somewhere between Mach 2 and Mach 7.
An entry damage induced breakup in Shuttle becomes possible to survive. At some point, the cabin would survive
post breakup heating and aerodynamic forces so that the crew could blow the hatch and use their parachutes. If Challenger
were equipped with the modern escape equipment (the David Clark Co. S1035 Advanced Crew Escape "Pumpkin" Suit (ACES) and the
pyro ejectable hatch, it is quite likely that some of her crew would have been able to escape the tumbling cabin and survive
the disaster. On STS-107, this equipment plainly did not make any difference, and would not have even if it were all
being used properly as the cabin broke up under 5-6g loading and Mach 12 at about 100,000 feet. (According
to the Crew Survival Working Group, 3 astronauts didn't have their gloves on, and one mid deck astronaut, After Columbia suspects
David Brown, did not have his helmet on.)
