I Bought an Awesome (if Obscure) Piece of Space History!

Beginning in the mid-1950s, engineers started looking into the problem of aerodynamic heating; the challenge was devising a way to have a warhead launch on a missile and reenter through the Earth's atmosphere unscathed so it could explode on target. The same principle carried over into spaceflight. In the early space age, a man took the place of the warhead on those same missiles. This ultimately led to the ablative heat shields that kept Apollo astronauts safe during their fiery returns through the atmosphere before splashdown, but they were a new technology in the 1960s. That meant, that like so many piece of Apollo, it was proved during the Gemini program.