CubeSats Spurring Satellite Revolution

You do realize that the Earth gets hit every day by stuff that would destroy your car's paint job (and perhaps the garage it was in) - if there wasn't something [wikipedia.org] in the way.

To reach Earth's surface, a vehicle would have to dissipate several tens of millions of joules of energy per kilogram of the vehicle. And it will, by heating up the atmosphere and vaporizing the vehicle. If the cubesat isn't designed for reentry, then most of the vehicle will probably be vaporized long before it reaches the Earth's surface. Even if somehow, it were made of unobtainium, that could withstand the heat of reentry intact, it'd still slow down to terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere. That might mess up someone's car, but it's not nuclear bomb-scale "duck and cover".

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/u92eMG6TGSw/story01.htm

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