Comment by modeless
2 days ago
Yes, reuse of the heat shield has been the biggest question mark of the whole program and this is by far the best result of any launch so far. This is the first time it looks plausible that you could consider reusing the heat shield.
Plausible? It was always plausible. This flight does nothing to increase or decrease that - it is still very much a wide open question. The goal is full rapid reusability, and nothing we have seen yet suggests that that is possible, because no Starship has flown twice, much less re-entered twice with the same non-refurbished tiles.
It may be that the heat shield is the thing that causes them to miss the BHAG. Starship will still be cool if it needs all-new tiles every flight but let’s not pretend that that would be anything but a miss for the program.
I sure hope they can figure it out.
Keep in mind that all the prior flights had deliberately missing tiles specifically to test how bad the damage would be. This one had no missing tiles so it should have essentially no damage to the hull.
I think the worst damage on previous flights was often not related to the missing tiles.
I think it was due to voids in the hinge area causing localized plasma impingement and heating. The v3 design has a more continuous shape around the hinges.
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