Australia

NASA studied the aerodynamic shape of these glass buttons when designing Apollo re-entry capsules.

Franz Eduard Suess coined the word tektite in 1900 and treated the Australian glasses as a distinct geographic class. Australites are unusual among tektites for their flanged buttons, rims melted and swept back as the glass re-entered the atmosphere at high speed. In the 1960s that shape became a working model for blunt-body re-entry design.