Sure, but they threw the capsules away afterwards and a big flat end saw the heat.
And the underside of the shuttle is what? The idea behind the ceramic tiles and carbon fiber panels on the shuttle is that they’re reusable. The problem with them is that the carbon fiber’s fragile and the tiles are individually shaped. Heck, here’s an idea for using leftover hydrogen fuel as the heat shield!
It’s amazing to me the tooling for those systems was just junked. The tooling for the B-1B and B-2 are stored at the air force AMARC facility in Tucson in case they are ever needed again. The KSC has enough land to have stored it all.
This, or something like it, may be used on the CEV. But it’s a mistake to think that the heat-shield material can be “rapidly applied”; it was, in fact, one of the most time-consuming processes in the fabrication of the Apollo. Using an ablative heat-shield on a reusable vehicle would be different from that on a single-use capsule; you’d want to design it to be removable in order to facilitate turnaround time.
Other proposals, such as active shielding (skin cooling) are good areas for research, but aren’t ready for prime time. There are some material enhancements and design changes to the Shuttle-type tiles that could make them more robust, but there’s always going to be an issue with attachment.
::shrug:: This was basically a political desicion to kill Apollo but good so it couldn’t compete with the Shuttle. I’m speculating, but I’m guessing the Shuttle looked like a great new cash cow to the aerospace contractors for whom Apollo was starting to be…a little too mature, i.e. ripe for cost reduction. There was also quite a bit of reorganization going on in the industry, and a certain amount of fear, perhaps, that Boeing was going to end up with the pie while everyone else just got merengue on their faces, which if true is ironic because Boeing ended up buying North American Rockwell (the Shuttle fabricator). The Shuttle is a family dinner for virtually every major contractor including traditional (if often collaborative) competitors such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, McDonnell-Douglas, Rocketdyne, TRW, NA Rockwell, Honeywell, and even solid-motor developer Morton-Thiokol (now ATK), which had traditionally been locked out of the space program. The only major contractor, other than Bell Aerospace (which had pretty much given up by the mid-Sixties), who didn’t have a big contract was Raytheon. Of course, most of these companies are now either divisions of one another (Boeing owns most of them, Northrop absorbed Grumman, Honeywell is out of the business entirely, and ATK, as the only provider of large solid rocket boosters left, has them all in a stranglehold.)
The development of the Shuttle is much more a study in politics than in engineering. And it’s one that leaves you wanting to take a long, clensing shower.
Stranger
Allow me to introduce you to my friend the disk grinder. 
Seriously, though, use a robotically controlled version to take off the old, and another robot to spray on the replacement, or build a really huge kiln and fire a tough ceramic coating on to the hull, so it’s reusable and there’s no danger of individual tiles falling off.
I just came across this interesting article about the uselessness of the Space Shuttle. It was written in 1980.
No one could build the fuel tank. And the best people in the business tried. It was predicated on a functional single-stage fuel tank and it couldn’t be done.
not really-in my opinion. The ISS is a dead end. Once the shuttle finishes building it, it will be mothballed. It’s basic problem is that it is in the wrong orbit. Way too high an inclination. Nothing in that orbit can reasonably go anywhere else (like the Moon or Mars). It is in that orbit to accomodate the Russians who need the orbit to reach the ISS with their vehicles from central asia. But it makes the ISS a dead end for the future. People talk about doing long-term space studies-and to the extent that those need to be done, the ISS does them well. But other than that, and being an excuse to keep the shuttle flying, it really doesn’t serve much purpose.
since his vehicle never approached the speeds necessary for space travel, he had no need for significant heat shielding.
It was a very nice piece of art. but even more pointless than the space shuttle turned out to be.
So did I not say that, or what? 