Comment by globalnode
2 days ago
Even if it landed perfectly how is it going to be rapidly reusable with all those tiles breaking and needing repair? Then if that problem was magically engineered-away through some sort of materials science breakthrough, it still makes more sense to me to keep your big ships in a space staging area and your smaller ones as atmospheric gophers.
All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights.
There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
You know a whole the size of a quarter can wreck the entire spacecraft and make it effectively throw away? Also, you'd want to use this many times. Making a system robust while not requiring months of refurbishment is really really hard.
The Space Shuttle had that problem because it was aluminum with a much lower melting point. It’s one of the reasons they’re using steel.
We’ve seen much larger holes than that in previous tests. Some of the control fins burned completely through.
They already demonstrated that entire tiles can be removed without wrecking the spacecraft.
The quarter thing may have been true for the space shuttle, that doesn't make it true in general.
For some of the tests, they removed a few tiles before launch, presumably to test that. Starship did fine.
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Deliberately testing its survivability with that failure mode over different parts of the vehicle has been one of the major foci throughout the entire test campaign, and it has proven remarkably resilient. That generalisation pretty much does not hold for starship.
I doubt that. It's made of stainless steel. If it gets home safely they can patch it.
Weren't the tiles one of the worst obstacles to quick turnaround times for the shuttle? It was something like 18 months before one could be launched again, and that's if they were in a hurry.
SpaceX has been specifically engineering both the tiles themselves (e.g. manufacturing) and the way that are used on the ship to be much more rapidly repairable than the Shuttle.
By the end they could turn a shuttle around in ten weeks.
They’ve already demonstrated they can replace all the tiles in a couple of days - even if they continue to have some fall off it won’t be an issue.
Small ships are less efficient, especially leaving the gravity well. Thats the whole point
Could you tell me more? I suppose a heavy two-stage rocket is not optimized from the point of view of the rocket equation, but I know nothing about this field.
In short, the more stages the better to discard mass once it isnt necessary, and the larger to the better to improve the ratio of (ship+payload) to fuel.
Here is a decent summary.
https://gemini.google.com/share/121466b300c1
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