SpaceX continues to improve the design of the Starship heat shield and has added small tanks to help with the engine restart.
The new designs were covered by Felix Schlang at What About It?
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Clean Energy Research Foundation Inc has material that will be ideal for constructing the heat shield for the Spaceship. Coalesced double walled carbon nanotube fibers have the world’s highest measured tensile modulus exceeding 1 terapascal, the have the worlds lowest coefficient of thermal expansion. A heat shield incorporating them won’t buckle or change dimensions or crack from rapid and extreme changes in temperature. And it has among the highest rates of thermal conductivity among graphite fibers. Next Big Future ran a number of articles about the materials and methods of US 10,059,595 Ultra High Strength Nanomaterials And Methods Of Manufacture
Inventor Neil Farbstein
The catch is, how well does it survive exposure to an oxidizing plasma?
The tiles don’t need high strength. Modest strength is good enough.
They don’t need high thermal conductivity, actually they need really LOW thermal conductivity, or else they might as well not be present.
They need chemical resistance to an oxidizing plasma at high temperature. I don’t believe carbon fiber has that.
And they need a high thermal emissivity, to radiate away as much heat as possible.
Wouldn’t the ideal material be one that rapidly conducted heat horizontally, but resisted conducting vertically (through the tile)? Spread the heat around to the ‘cold’ side to radiate away, while keeping it away from the inner tank wall. SpaceX discrete tiles presumably can’t conduct heat very far – but a sandwich of inner insulator, thin continuous metal layer, outer thermal tile layer might let heat spread around more?
Also – if most of the heat transfer to the surface is convective from the hotter shock wavefront, would it not be better to move that shockwave further away? I’m thinking maybe a waffle-grid, so the thin and high ‘grid’ pushes the shockwave away from the majority of the nearly flat tile surface. Could be a problem for stability in thicker air though, by inducing more turbulence?
The ideal material would be one that had essentially zero thermal conductivity, high heat resistance, high chemical resistance, and very high thermal emissivity.
Mostly the shield protects by having its surface heat up and radiate the heat away, while not conducting it to the interior.
The problem to date has been cracking of the tiles. I think this is probably a result of reflected acoustic energy during takeoff. The noise generated by the booster is insane, after all.
Show videos of them resisting a blow torch without heating what’s below them.