I'll have to see what they are proposing to believe it, and seeing how they have been doing some pretty impressive stuff, they might suprise me.<br /><br />Barring that, the shuttle, or any spacecraft in controlled re-entry is doing so because it has been designed to use the earths atmosphere as a brake rather than use propulsive braking to overcome the effects of earths gravity. This has been the only practical demonstrated method of re-entry so far utilized. For a conventional spacecraft to overcome gravity on re-entry, it would have to have massive amounts of propellant to continuously fire engines to overcome gravity. Kind of like...launch in reverse. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>