Comment by fooblaster
1 day ago
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.
coming back in one piece, and being good enough to use for 5 more missions are two very different things. For example, all existing reentry vehicles come back "fine" but they need to be completely remade to go up again.
I remember this being the same argument used against the Falcon 9 when it first stuck its landings.
"Oh, they'll need to do it 10x to be profitable!"
Now they do, as a matter of course.
2 replies →
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.