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The gasses get so hot they give off a lot of black body radiation. Heat shield is mostly beat up with infrared.

When the gases decompress they'll be a lot cooler, just like your AC.

I believe for entry from LEO, and particularly for small RVs like this one, convective heating is orders of magnitude higher than radiative heating.

From Slide 7: "Radiation dominates convection at ~11.5km/s for 1m radius • Radiation dominates convection at ~10km/s for 5m radius"

Since this is reentering from LEO, it's maybe 8km/s (and dropping). And the radius of curvature on the nose of that shield was maybe 20 cm?