okay, here's something I've never understood: in many articles about re-entry, there's the blurb about the angle needing to be exactly right - too steep, you burn up, too shallow, you skip back into space but why is skipping "catastrophically bad", as one article puts it??
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TL;DR: Yes, your intuitions were correct both for apollo and the minor thermal load for increased periods of time being bad for LEO missions
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But really it's more of the craft being designed for a specific re-entry profile, which could be steep or shallow or even intentionally skip as Gemini did, but the craft does need to re-enter at the angle it was designed for or you will exceed peak heat or run out of ablator/o2
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