Comment by fooblaster
1 day ago
The hardest problem in the entire design had yet to be solved. Having a robust human rated tile system that can be rapidly turned around is a huge engineering challenge that kind of breaks the whole point of the design if it doesn't work. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually give up and go back to a cheaper throw away second stage, or throw out the tile design completely and try for some evaporative cooling approach, again.
They’ve already shown they can replace all the tiles in a couple of days with removal and new install. No reason they couldn’t do even faster turn around with just re-install if that was needed.
And human rating is a NASA requirement they won’t have to worry about for a few years.
I really hope to see the evaporative cooling make a comeback but it seems unnecessary when it’s returning to earth right now.
It would also be interesting to see them do shallower dips into the atmosphere then pull back out and repeat. Like a skipping stone. Lots of expansion contraction, but might work better without tiles.
They did that during the return of Ship on this test flight.
Bear in mind that a lot of what's happening to the tiles now is deliberate experiments to see how much weight they can shave off and how many failed tiles they can survive. Given that the vehicle is routinely surviving reentry at this point, it doesn't seem "hard" to make the tiles more robust by paying for it with added weight. The question is whether they'll have enough weight budget to pay for it? But at this point...probably? Not my area ofc.
"surviving reentry" and being reusable are two very different things, particularly if this is to become human rated.
Human rating is irrelevant to what they want to do, it is only a NASA rating - if NASA wants to ride they will have to come up with a rationale but private astronauts can fly on it.
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Well at least for one part of that, 90-something percent of the launches don't need to be human rated.