This study represents a means of highlighting the myriad of technological developments that made possible the safe reentry and return from space and the landing on Earth. This story extends back at least to the work of Walter Hohmann and Eugen Sanger in Germany in the 1920s and involved numerous aerospace engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)/NASA Langley and the Lewis (now the John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field) and Ames Research Centers. For example, researchers such as H. Julian Allen and Alfred J. Eggers, Jr., at Ames pioneered blunt-body reentry...