>Also, ballistic missiles have no means of communication with the outside world I thought there were old research about objects during reentry communicating th

>Also, ballistic missiles have no means of communication with the outside world I thought there were old research about objects during reentry communicating through the plasma? (I think I saw articles from the 1990s(?) on putting metal into the plasma and making it transparent at some wavelengths?) You get Google hits for variants of: communicating through reentry plasma How trustworthy Scientific American is these days is debatable, but this was a recent article. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=piercing-the-plasma&print=true http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=piercing-th... (This discussion wasn't really relevant to your point, of course...) Disclaimer: This is a subject far from anything where I might really know anything, so I might be barking up the wrong tree.