SpaceX removed about 72 tiles in 18 key locations for Starship Flight 11 and there was no catastrophic failure. This could allow SpaceX to optimize the heat shield and remove 10-20% of tiles over lower heating areas.
SpaceX will choose to remain extra cautious but they can eventually reduce heat shield tiles.
SpaceX is scaling up to making 1000 heat shield tiles per day which will be enough to reach a mass production target of 10 Starships per month.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Hi Brian! Love your blog! Keep up the good work!
Hey, re: the starship heatshield tiles… why can’t spacex produce larger tiles (and therefore need less of them per starship)?
Semi-guessing here but I think the general reason is thermal expansion. More tiles = more seams between tiles. More seams means each seem experiences a smaller share of the total expansion/contraction/flex of the stainless steel body, making it easier to keep them plasma-tight.
I’d imagine it is also easier to mass-manufacture flat tiles, which can only be so big before they no longer create a smooth enough surface along the circumference of the ship.
They still have lots of custom tiles but I’d imagine the size of the standard tile is also optimized to minimize the number of custom tiles needed while satisfying the above constraints.
Well, I ran some quick calculations; Most of the tiles are about 480mm across the long dimension, with sides that run about 240mm. (Of course! They’re hexagonal…)
For a 9m diameter cylinder, the chordal deviation at that size is about 6.5mm, which doesn’t seem like a lot. Within a given tile, it’s probably irrelevant.
But, of course, given a hexagonal tiling, you’re going to have conflicting chordal deviations at the corners where three tiles meet, and making some reasonable assumptions about the size of the gap between the tiles… That’s about a 4.5mm discrepancy in height across the tile gap.
Honestly? I think that’s probably big enough to matter, at hypersonic speeds. It’s enough to cause extra heating on some of the tile edges and especially the corners. So if it were up to me, they’d go to curved tiles. Maybe not immediately, though: Flat tiles ARE easier to manufacture, and at this point they actively WANT to stress the tiles, so maybe they consider switching to curved tiles at this stage to be premature optimization?
But, frankly, maybe the tiles end up good enough at resisting heat that this is just a minor enough issue that it’s just not worth worrying about.
I would suspect that among their tile experiments, they’ve got some patches that actually DO use curved rather than flat tiles. So they’ll soon know, rather than just be speculating, whether it’s worth doing.
The goal, of course, isn’t a heat shield that survives one reentry. It’s a heat shield that survives hundreds of reentries. Just as the goal isn’t engines that survive one flight, it’s engines that last for hundreds of flights.
It’s simply impossible to do the sort of testing that requires in one reentry. Starship is going to be in active development for most of it’s operational life, as they accumulate enough operational hours to see what wears out. They’ll only stop development on it when it’s approaching the end of its operational life.
[ It might be interesting having an AI-driven/supported development path/version and a human knowledge&experience centered device.
(If taking best of both recommendations it’s a compromise, but not a showcase for the differences between machine learning driven and human experience driven developments, especially through several iterations into a future. USS Enterprise&’deflector shields’, but that’s 23rd/24th century(, then)? ) (thx) ]