What’s the News: Virgin Galactic’s plans for taking tourists into space have inched closer to fulfillment: earlier this month, the company’s SpaceShipTwo successfully demonstrated the technique, called “feathering,” that will allow the ship to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. In this video, you can watch the ship, designed to behave like a badminton shuttlecock, tip and roll as the pilot flips the craft’s tail to a 65 degree angle, which will brake SpaceShipTwo while it’s still high in the atmosphere. This means the ship will descend slowly enough to keep from igniting as it reenters.

How the Heck:

Velocity is the main reason objects burn up when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere—the friction between a speeding meteor, say, and the gasses in the atmosphere is so great that the meteor ignites.
The Space Shuttle is covered with heat shields that absorb the heat generated by friction, but there are more elegant solutions for flights that don’t need to go into orbit, including feathering, which was first described in 1958. With this technique, part of the craft’s tail flips up to increase drag early in the process, so as it hurtles deeper into the atmosphere it doesn’t reach the velocities that result in ...