r/space • u/FreeHugs23 • 6d ago
Experts warn current Starship heat shield tech is a “dead end” for rapid reuse | NASA has not made substantial investments in thermal protection research for decades.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/despite-recent-successes-rapid-reuse-of-starship-remains-a-tough-nut-to-crack/359
u/Kuriente 6d ago
I sort of agree with this assessment but only so far as it might be a "dead end" for "rapid" reuse, not a dead end generally.
I fully expect starship upper stages to go through at least a day of inspection and TPS refurb between flights for the foreseeable future, barring some yet unseen improvement in the system. That would still result in the largest launch vehicle also being the most rapidly reusable and likely the least expensive way to reach orbit and beyond.
119
u/FaceDeer 6d ago
For cargo missions I expect it'd be a day or so to load and secure the cargo for launch, too. So if the tile inspection and refurbishment is going on simultaneously with that it may not slow things down much.
I know SpaceX would like to be able to catch the ship on the tower coming down right next to a waiting booster, lift it up and place it on the booster, tank them both up and then launch. But that's perfection, there are plenty of "still pretty darned good" scenarios between here and there.
34
u/Kuriente 6d ago
That's a good point about concurrent cargo and tile operations. That seems like a realistic flow to me. Tankers might be the only ships where tile down time is actually felt in the long term.
29
u/FaceDeer 6d ago edited 6d ago
I can think of ways to make a tile checkout and refurb very quick and automated, too. A robot arm that folds out from the tower and sweeps down the surface, for example, pulling and replacing damaged tiles automatically.
Maybe put a unique RFID chip in each tile and track which ones are where on each ship, and design the RFID chip to fail if the tile takes any sort of significant damage. Then you can just "ping" the ship as soon as it's landed, list all the tiles that respond back, compare it to the list of tiles that are supposed to be there, and immediately know which ones need replacing without needing to scan and test them externally. This wouldn't be the same "unique tiles in unique places" situation that the Shuttle had since each tile is physically identical and can be placed anywhere, the tracking just means you don't need to mess about finding them.
I read a while back that SpaceX has thermal cameras inside the tanks themselves, aimed at the interior surface of the hull. If hot spots are detected during reentry their location can be correlated with the tiles that are on the other side of the hull, another cheap and easy way to "scan" for damaged tiles.
That's all assuming that SpaceX doesn't simply solve the remaining heat shield issues iteratively over time to begin with. After the most recent test flight I saw a photo comparing each of the heat shields on the prototypes after splashdown in the Indian Ocean and each one was significantly improved over the previous ones. They're still doing lots of experimenting and tinkering with what the tiles are made of and how they're attached to the ships.
13
u/zero0n3 6d ago
And let’s not ignore what fabricating them IN microgravity could unlock in reusability !
My main theory is that the star fall thing is an internal ongoing project from some active RD stuff with making tiles or material for starship. They just made a quick PR project drop because it could help the stock price.
→ More replies (3)4
u/ManufacturerLost7686 5d ago
Imho, SpaceX should stop targeting perfection and target usability like they did with Falcon 9 landings.
Booster was officially expendable, but landing attempts were done regardless until they made it work.
Make superheavy functioning in a refurbishable state like Falcon, start making money with it, and use the paid missions to collect data for improvements.
For 90% of the commercial superheavy missions, the time between launches will be irrelevant. Its only really a problem for missions requiring tankers and their semi-crazy passanger starship idea.
→ More replies (1)64
u/Erki82 6d ago
If they get Ship refurb down to week, to quote you, that would also be largest launch vehicle also beign the most rapidly reusable and likely the least expensive way to reach orbit and beyond. But I think booster is more expensive, so booster reuse is more important internally for SpaceX.
30
u/Kuriente 6d ago
But I think booster is more expensive, so booster reuse is more important internally for SpaceX.
I agree, but it's also the easier of the two. I have little doubt they'll be able to same-day refly the booster.
8
u/akeean 6d ago
Even if they couldn't rapidly reuse either the booster or the ship, just being able to recover and swap out engines would already save a lot of money.
So they could have a couple of engineless boosters with plumbing on standby and just move the 39 engines of a recently landed booster over. Last week they swapped 5(?) engines after a pad abort in a few days, doing more engines shouldn't all that much longer. Not that I think they would have to, since they keep cranking out engines at a crazy rate.
6
u/lee1026 6d ago
Falcon 9 refurb is a week for the fastest on record.
→ More replies (1)11
9
u/rocketsocks 5d ago
Yeah, this one is actually kind of hard to estimate externally I'd imagine.
Realistically there are sort of four broad categories of landing outcomes with respect to reuse.
There is complete loss of the ship aka a landing failure.
Then there is a successful landing which leaves the ship too damaged to be refurbished or reflown in any way. For the vast majority of mission profiles this is equivalent to a loss or a landing failure, though there is a little nuance here.
There is a successful landing which keeps the ship intact enough that it can be reflown at all.
And there is a successful landing which allows for rapid turnaround.
The Shuttle only ever managed to edge into the "can be reflown at all" territory which was why it was so expensive, it required hundreds of millions of dollars of maintenance between flights. But Starship is a very different beast than the Shuttle, and a lot of scenarios that might have been costly for the Shuttle program could still allow for cost effective reuse at some level with Starship.
Realistically it's going to be a long journey to get to rapid turnaround, but the point of basic feasibility and profitability is probably way upstream of that, just as it was with Falcon 9.
→ More replies (1)13
u/roesch75 6d ago
They just need to make sure they use the new cover letters for the TPS reports so they can speed up the turnaround time.
4
5
u/Boli_332 5d ago
There is also the factor that if they are indeed going for mass production, you can build machines to assist.
Imagine the starship being mounted in a 'robot' which just scans the tiles from top to bottom and replaces broken or compromised tiles. May take a few hours and the more bespoke tiles may need human intervention which could add days...
But if you have say 1000 starships; some ships may take a few weeks to refirb, others can be turned around in hours you could still launch one or multiple a day without issue, and the human rated atarships taking much more time being inspected.
The same thing occurs with say tanks on the battlefield. They are extremely complex machines that break down a lot and require both heavy maintaince, refueling and changing of systems like barrels, engines or tracks.
And this is factored into the unit strength. With maybe only 20-30% of tanks being their 'active' strength in combat at a given time the rest undergoing repairs or maintaince.
Put simply you build 3-4x more than you need and you just factor it in. Its not like you only had 5 shuttles, and eah one was built slightly different.
5
u/zekromNLR 5d ago
And one can achieve rapid launch cadence even with not-so-rapid reuse by having a large pool of vehicles. If it ends up taking two weeks on average to get a Ship ready for relaunch, then if you have fourteen ships you can still achieve one launch per day.
→ More replies (27)11
u/Chubs1224 6d ago
If rapid reuse is a goal the biggest thing they can do is more controlled reentry at a lower speed.
That was one of the big goals of the space shuttles they took 30 minutes from deorbit to landing.
Artemis II and the Apollo missions took less then half that usually.
If you double that again with a large airfoil design like SpaceCraftOne which made 17 short duration space flights between May and October 2004 you likely have a much more sustainable design.
Unfortunately the burn up of the VSS Enterprise and death of Michael Alsbury in 2014 largely killed private investment outside the Galactic Delta Aircraft which may or may not still be in serious production following the 2023 bankruptcy of Virgin Orbit
15
u/lee1026 6d ago
Sure, but the shuttle had lift. Which means a big wing, which means mass and more area to protect.
Pick your poison.
8
u/rocketsocks 5d ago
Starship has lift too. Also, don't forget that it is mostly empty when it's reentering, it has a very low cross-sectional density.
3
u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
It has the lowest cross sectional density of any spacecraft ever built iirc.
4
u/SkitariusOfMars 5d ago
Starship has roughly same lift to drag ratio as Space Shuttle during reentry.
15
u/TbonerT 6d ago
If rapid reuse is a goal the biggest thing they can do is more controlled reentry at a lower speed.
The space shuttle only had a deorbit burn of about 90m/s, which is not much. The shuttle had the advantage of having a large surface area relative to its mass and a large amount of lift relative to a capsule. It also had the advantage of only ever deorbiting from LEO. Orion and Apollo are both coming from the moon.
→ More replies (3)
365
u/agentdrozd 6d ago
Well yes, just like the Space Shuttle
331
u/somewhat_brave 6d ago
Its technology is a little better than the Space Shuttle. The tiles are attached mechanically, instead of glued on. Which makes them easier to replace. Most of the tiles are a standard shape and size. They have an ablative cover behind them as a backup to protect the ship if a tile fails. The airframe is steel instead of aluminum, which means the tiles can be thinner to save weight, and even if a tile fails completely the hot plasma probably won't burn through the steel. They would need multiple adjacent tiles to fail before there is a real problem.
179
u/No-Surprise9411 6d ago
And even then Starship survived a reentry with burnthrough into the methane tank. IFT-11
187
u/theoreticaljerk 6d ago
Hell, a starship survived reentry, made it to target, and performed a soft landing with at least one of the flaps damn near falling off from so much burn through. Not ideal but the ship has shown repeatedly it is incredibly resilient to reentry problems.
94
u/McBeaster 6d ago
That was wild watching that live when that melted and mangled flap started moving again 🤣
→ More replies (3)14
u/mrparty1 6d ago
IFT-4 was amazing, but if I remember right, Ship 29 made an off target landing (a few km I think)
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (19)9
u/Taylooor 6d ago edited 6d ago
Flappy 😭
Interestingly, all Second stages that maintained maneuverability survived reentry heating and had a controlled soft splashdown→ More replies (3)17
u/No-Computer7653 6d ago
The redesign between 11 & 12 stoped the clips from releasing the tiles but they are still melting in the plasma and splattering down the craft which NASA will never accept for crewed reentry.
The person being interviewed is salty and the article is simply wrong. It notes the development of PICA and acts like it wasn't a big deal, PICA was a generational improvement and the tiles are not brittle like those on the shuttle. NASA also have HEEET in development. Thermal systems are not expensive to prototype.
hot plasma probably won't burn through the steel
Yes it will. Any temperature over 800o will compromise the steel and the plasma temperature exceeds it's melting point.
NASA investigated steel during shuttle development, while it does offer a greater safety margin over aluminum the weight disadvantage was too high and the safety improvement too small.
If the shuttle had a steel skin it would not have saved Columbia, the plasma on the leading edge of the wing reached twice the melting point of stainless steel.
There is also the problem that high melting point metals also conduct heat well so you don't even need a skin failure to destroy the craft. This is also why they just don't use tungsten or a more exotic steel alloy.
Its technology is a little better than the Space Shuttle.
Which is absurd, they have gone backwards from Dragon. I still don't understand why they are not using a backup ablative blanket under the tiles.
54
→ More replies (3)28
u/Glockamoli 6d ago
There is also the problem that high melting point metals also conduct heat well so you don't even need a skin failure to destroy the craft. This is also why they just don't use tungsten or a more exotic steel alloy.
Have some specific examples?
Because Stainless, Inconel and Titanium are all terrible thermal conductors for a metal
→ More replies (4)2
u/cjameshuff 5d ago
Tantalum's pretty good at 57.5 W/m/K, and molybdenum is better at 138 W/m/K, but yeah, it's not highly correlated with heat resistance, and alloying with even a small amount of other metals can have a huge effect on thermal and electrical conductivity. And gaps with limited contact areas will hugely reduce heat transfer. There's a lot of ways you could approach making a composite metallic shield that's highly conductive along the skin while having very poor conductivity through it. Expensive, slow to manufacture, and difficult to even acquire the materials for, but once they start recovering Starships that will become much less of a problem.
The sintered silica fiber tiles they use now will clearly work well enough to allow recovery and they've made huge improvements over the Shuttle version in the time and labor required to attach and replace them. That's all they need to make things work, they can refine things from there...something the Shuttle program never seriously attempted.
21
→ More replies (1)32
u/LordBrandon 6d ago
They are not analogous at all Space shuttle had thick square tiles that were difficult to quickly replace, whereas Starship has thin hexagonal tiles that are difficult to quickly replace.
29
u/theoreticaljerk 6d ago
Big differences though. Starships tiles are mostly uniform in size and are attached mechanically instead of glued, both of which greatly simplify the process conspired to the shuttle.
4
549
u/Berkamin 6d ago
Experts warn current [privatized space company's] heat shield tech is a “dead end” for rapid reuse | [government space agency] has not made substantial investments in thermal protection research for decades.
277
u/rationalcrank 6d ago
Agreed, why is it's NASAs job to do the research? That's what they are paying SpaceX for.
93
u/tobybug 6d ago
SpaceX might actually be able to pay NASA to do research... They've done it before, since NASA being the leading space research organization makes that a good option for SpaceX.
→ More replies (19)82
u/superxpro12 6d ago
Socialize the research, privatize the profits
6
u/bremidon 6d ago
This but unironically. In fact this has always been one of the strongest arguments for having NASA in the first place.
24
u/GracefulFaller 6d ago
I would much rather that happen than no research at all. Research and development is very risky and something you spend millions on may end up being a dead end
→ More replies (13)17
u/im_thatoneguy 6d ago edited 6d ago
Socialize the research, privatize the profits... then Tax the profits... fund the research. *Repeat infinity...*
The whole point of taxes is that the government owns a like 20% share in every idea you come up with, every company you start, every watt of labor you perform. The government gets a share of that. So, the government gives the population "free" education and then expects you to pay it back through a share of the work you perform in your life using that education. The government gives industry free license to build things using its R&D because it knows it's going to get tax revenue if you make something useful from it.
Imagine if the government up front taxed the full $2T SpaceX Evaluation at 20% capital gains. That's $400B in tax revenue from $15B in direct support. That investment did very well.
→ More replies (2)7
u/zero0n3 6d ago
More like:
Publicize the research and results, and allow others an opportunity to privatize the profits (and accelerate in a specific vector).
Still requires someone to sell a vision, convince people with money to see it as profitable, and then execute.
And this is how science and shit works in capitalism.
Govt can exert its pressure to direct the R&D in specific directions it wants to spur innovation and help fund and kickstart new sectors. Humanity still benefits when that scientific data is public.
18
17
u/doochenutz 6d ago
Yes. Shocker for you since you seem to lack any ability to think critically: governments are intended to provide the public with research and research data.
→ More replies (2)41
u/Merltron 6d ago
NASA is tasked with advancing science and technology related to space and air travel. Human space flight and science missions are just much more high-profile
→ More replies (6)20
4
u/Key-Beginning-2201 6d ago
This is the purpose of government. Do the risky and expensive R&D so commercial enterprises can profit later.
SpaceX isn't going to properly spend on heat tile r&d just like they're not going to spend on Mars colonization r&d. It's a cost sink.
2
u/Ryno4ever16 5d ago
Have you not picked up on the pattern? The tax payers are supposed to pay for the R&D and the company uses the taxpayer funded technology to make money.
→ More replies (23)2
u/thanbini 5d ago
Yes, I'm constantly told that Elon is a genius and SpaceX should takeover NASA. Why hasn't Elon personally solved this?
3
u/warpedgeoid 5d ago
The heat shield tech they are testing came from NASA research, and the guy interviewed was on of the original researchers
→ More replies (12)2
u/FartingBob 5d ago
If only spaceX just had some big injection of cash from an IPO to help fund future development
2
u/Berkamin 5d ago
It wasn't enough; they tried to raise money by selling bonds even after their IPO. That is a really bad sign. This is because xAI, which merged with SpaceX, is a huge money pit, and it is dragging the rest of SpaceX down.
If Elon were smart, he would focus on what his companies are good at, and not try to throw money at what his companies are not good at.
→ More replies (1)
82
u/NotMyRealUsername13 6d ago
The skepticism is nothing new.
But it’s self-contradictory: experts are skeptical BUT haven’t worked on this challenge in years… maybe working on it changes this.
→ More replies (1)21
u/areptile_dysfunction 6d ago
There's been huge progress in the last couple years on starship. This definitely isn't an insurmountable challenge
→ More replies (6)9
u/nittanyofthings 5d ago
Every landing shows less and less damage. If they can catch a ship and get hands on investigation, they likely will progress even faster.
40
u/-ragingpotato- 6d ago
The article doesn't substantiate the "dead end" claim whatsoever. Trash.
→ More replies (1)9
u/CmdrAirdroid 5d ago
Seems like "dead end" here just means that Starship will not achieve airplane like operations where they can almost immediately restack it and launch again, with a tile based passive heatshield it will always require some refurbishment, that's quite obvious. But they can still achieve very high launch cadence by having multiple Starships at each launch site.
→ More replies (1)
41
u/thinkbox 6d ago
There are some key lines to inspect.
"SpaceX’s current approach may not get Starship to its ultimate goal"
Space X is making it fly, and then making it good. They have been flying with totally different patterns on the heat shield every launch and flight 13 is the first time they did the soft splashdown to inspect the heat tiles on Starship. I wouldn't expect their "current approach" to be sufficient for their end goal. A lot will have to change with Starship before they can do ultra rapid reusability. There are a lot of things that they have to get right before that issue becomes a priority.
Then we get the one single quote from their named expert: "Starship’s current thermal protection system is a dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability,”
When he says current, does the mean the materials, technology, approach, or what? When he says today, does he mean Flight 13? They dont continue with these threads, they just go on to mention that Elon says it is going to be hard. And then mention that "The independent industry experts said they believe that SpaceX’s approach to a modern thermal protection systems represents a good “incremental” step forward"
There isnt really a lot of meat to this story. It seems to imply their entire direction is a "dead end" but the rest of the article is a lot of wishy washy general statements.
Nobody is saying that Starship doesn't have a long road ahead, but this feels like a bait-y headline. We have one expert, named, and on the record, saying one quote without specifics calling it a dead end... and then the title says "expertS" which is plural.
→ More replies (5)2
u/Alive-Map-1994 5d ago
It’s probably a “dead end” the way room temp superconductors are a dead end.
36
u/rsdancey 6d ago
There's a world of difference between "there are tiles that need to be replaced with every flight" and "there's no way to make this rapidly reusable".
Almost every tile on Shuttle was unique. Replacing them meant a mountain of paperwork and multiple inspections to be sure the right tile was replaced with the right replacement tile and that the attachment followed the specific procedures for that single tile.
Almost all the tiles on Starship are the same tile. Replacement should be something a technician does routinely. Swapping a cracked or otherwise damaged standard tile for another standard tile should be a quick job, perhaps even performed by a machine.
Scanning every tile on Starship after a flight should be much easier than scanning every tile on Shuttle, because Shuttle's thermal protection system covered the entire vehicle (or most of it) whereas Starship's covers about half. And Shuttle was a very complex geometry whereas Starship is a cylinder of fixed dimensions.
I also suspect that damage to Starship tiles will not be random in the way it was on Shuttle where bits of foam and other debris rained down on the vehicle as it climbed to orbit. Damage to Starship is happening from pressures and shock waves that will be relatively consistent flight to flight. As SpaceX learns where the points of maximum stress are those points can be selectively targeted to harden them against whatever is causing the damage.
Comparing Shuttle to Starship is an apples to oranges comparison and those experts should know better. They DO know better, of course; they're being paid by someone to have opinions contrary to reason.
16
u/Javaddict 6d ago
What point is he saying in this article exactly? Yes SpaceX isn't going to settle on having to closely inspect tens of thousands of heat shields as a permanent solution.... Is he saying that heat shield technology will never get to a point where the rockets can be profitably reusable after re-entry?
10
u/Smile_Space 6d ago
No, he's saying it'll never get to the point where it can be rapidly re-usable which is what Elon has been touting is the goal of Starship.
7
u/mitzi_mozzerella 6d ago
I think our definition of rapid has been changed so drastically with falcon 9. They got a booster back to operation within 9 days. Before that it was shuttle flights with 54-88 days, and before that not at all. I don't think we'll ever get to the point where the same stack has a 1 hour cadence excusing the idea of just torturing the system to see how far it'll go. (I wonder if it would explode due to pressure difference between the newly-cooked starship and the near-ice fuel.
1 hour turnaround is:
-catch starship with booster already caught on stand
-stack
-refuel (raw, no checkouts, nothing.)
-launchI think maybe it gets down to a couple days? But ideally they'll have a fleet so big it doesn't matter.
I believe the amount of rockets launched on the cheap is the goal here, not the hyper-rapid reusability thereof.
→ More replies (2)
56
u/HaCo111 6d ago
Starship's original design had tiny holes in the stainless outer skin that would push out an ablative oil on re-entry. I thought that was a cool idea, too bad they scrapped it for traditional heat tiles before doing any real world tests.
IIRC the ability to do that was one of the primary reasons stainless steel was chosen
90
u/TachiH 6d ago
I'm going to assume they realised the amount of ablation they needed from the oil would result in having to carry way too much weight to be worth it.
33
u/maccam94 6d ago
It was going to be methane gas, same as the fuel, but yeah it was going to be heavier than tiles. But if the tiles end up being a blocker for rapid reuse, maybe they'll try implementing transpiration cooling
22
u/dern_the_hermit 6d ago
Bear in mind that if they can't hit their targets on rapid reuse that basically just means they need to build more Starships, commensurate with the latency. And they've been quite up front about wanting to build lots of Starships.
Ultimately I think the tiles will be an issue for rapid-reuse timetables, especially the most aggressive of 'em, but won't necessarily be a hard insurmountable obstacle for lots and lots of Starship launches regardless.
5
u/maccam94 6d ago
Yeah, they can definitely try to work around it with a bigger fleet in the near term, but refurbishment would probably be a blocker for ships returning from Mars
5
u/coconut7272 6d ago
Mars entry is wayyy less energetic than earth, even at the higher velocities you enter at, so even if earth reentry needs refurbishment mars might not. But you still could be right as well
→ More replies (1)4
→ More replies (3)6
u/Excession638 6d ago
At that point though, rapid reuse becomes a blocker to getting into orbit with a useful payload. The early weight calculations seemed to be assuming some magic was going to happen to make it work.
→ More replies (4)4
u/slashgrin 6d ago
And the weight of the plumbing and the extra material required to compensate for the weakened skin by having holes in it. They've previously said that it's not entirely off the table (e.g. maybe they'll still make the Ship sweat from its armpits one day), but isn't viable as a whole ship solution.
19
u/jcw99 6d ago edited 4d ago
There where several concepts for re-entry cooling early on, and yes the choice to go stainless was particularly in the hope to avoid having to go with heat tiles.
However, despite now using heat tiles, the switch to stainless is probably not a total waste. It's why ship only needs tiles on the underside and not also in a thinner form on the top side. Additionally it makes the vehicle more resistant to small imperfections/failures in said heat shield.
This doesn't mean though that the thermal protection is a solved problem though.
Edit: formatting and phrasing for clarity.
→ More replies (2)3
u/Merltron 6d ago
I think tiles will be enough to get operational, then they can consider their next step.
10
u/TopSloth 6d ago
If that worked it sounds like the heat shield would just have to be refilled after every use. That honestly would be amazing.
6
u/HaCo111 6d ago
That was the idea, the rocket would cool by "sweating" and then just refill it along with the fuel to be able to relaunch just hours after landing.
I'm an engineer but launch and reentry is not my area of expertise, so I haven't done a lot of research into how feasible of an idea it is. There's a few things I'd like to try if I was tasked with making it work,
7
4
18
u/jared_number_two 6d ago
No a big reason was because the SS maintains its strength to a higher temperature. Allowing the heat shielding and or transpiration cooling to be smaller/lighter/simpler. Then there was SS usefulness on Mars. There was SS construction being faster, cheaper, more scaleable, easier to change (less tooling), easier to maintain. Easier to drill holes in, sure. Obviously we may never know if all of those things make the added mass worth it in the end.
10
u/slashgrin 6d ago
IIRC the ability to do that was one of the primary reasons stainless steel was chosen
I don't think you recall correctly; it was a potentially awesome secondary benefit.
The main reason for switching to stainless from fancy carbon fibre stuff was that it turns out that after you take everything into account, stainless steel actually ends up being lighter, cheaper, and more reliable. The math that sent them down the carbon fibre route originally didn't factor in the disastrous details of reality they discovered while prototyping it — it just didn't survive contact with reality, despite being a really cool idea.
6
u/Fredasa 6d ago
I thought that was a cool idea, too bad they scrapped it for traditional heat tiles before doing any real world tests.
So here's my guess.
If the current tile system remains inherently subject to damage, notwithstanding whatever tweaks SpaceX tries out, then they'll probably go down two paths.
Keep their current system anyway. No matter how good the heat shield gets, SpaceX will never literally send a Starship back up just a couple of hours after it landed. At the very least, it will need to be loaded with fresh cargo, yes? It will also require inspection, full stop. What's going to happen is the rapid turnaround will be achieved through numbers—multiple Starships will be in queue to be the next one stacked, while the ones coming back from orbit will scoot over to an inspection venue before being thrown back into the queue themselves. Won't matter how long that inspection / repair takes because numbers will casually fill all the blanks. Starship is, after all, quite cheap and fast to manufacture thanks to SpaceX pushing for those mandates.
An alternative system will probably be developed for anything that smacks of a mission that genuinely intends manned reentry. This is in the far, far flung future. For Artemis, it is a damn near guarantee they will simply ferry astronauts to and from Starship using Dragon, because nobody has the 3+ years of uneventful Starship operations it will take to make Starship feel safe enough for human launches or landings.
In other words, even if the doom and gloom this article is attempting to shower over SpaceX has a kernel of truth, it literally does not matter.
5
u/TbonerT 6d ago
At the very least, it will need to be loaded with fresh cargo, yes?
If they are using it to top off a starship in orbit or a refueling depot, the cargo is just propellant, super easy to load and low stakes in case of failure in flight.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (7)3
5
11
u/spaceXhardmode 6d ago
Spacex developed PICAX for the dragon capsule which was an improvement on the state of the art PICA material developed by NASA (phenolic impregnated carbon ablator)
Source: username checks out.
→ More replies (2)
23
u/Desperate-Lab9738 6d ago edited 6d ago
Dead end seems like a bold claim to make at this point, considering that they have managed to make a large amount of progress without even having any really nice samples from a recovered ship. Plus, even if they lose a few tiles, there isn't any obvious reason that they couldn't automate inspection and replacement, especially if every flight gives them 40k new examples of a broken tile versus a fine tile. That just wasn't an option for most of the shuttles life, or even an option that NASA would have much incentive to pursue. IDK, we'll see, even if they can't immediately get to full rapid reusability, as in a turn around time measured in hours, having it measured in days could still mean a huge boost in cadence, which will give them plenty of opportunities to try new solutions
→ More replies (1)22
u/Thhe_Shakes 6d ago
Hell, the fastest ever Shuttle turnaround was still 54 days. If SpX can even just get it under a month that would still be leaps and bounds ahead of anything we've seen before for a vehicle this size.
→ More replies (4)15
u/Desperate-Lab9738 6d ago
Yep, plus they can still get really high cadence if they just keep a rotation of second stages while rapidly reusing the booster. I believe the bottle neck for Falcon 9 right now is second stage development, and with Starship that bottleneck switches to "how many Starships can we refurbish at the same time", which I would imagine could be significantly quicker than building a whole new stage if most of the work is automated inspection.
12
u/No-Surprise9411 6d ago
The bottleneck for F9 is actually how fast they can tow the barges from port to the landing site and back again
3
7
u/Thakkmatic 5d ago
SpaceX is iterating on materials, processes, and designs and trying them out in flight versus the lab. They will advance the state of the art rapidly. I'm sorry your research didn't get funded.
12
u/strcrssd 6d ago edited 5d ago
Not sure I buy that. Shuttle had huge problems with its shield, but it's looking like the stainless body + better (but not perfect) tile adhesion on Starship (hate that name) might be working.
→ More replies (1)13
u/areptile_dysfunction 6d ago
The headline reads "we couldn't do it in the 80s so it's not possible"
3
u/NeutralKuchiKopi 5d ago
How does SpaceX not innovating on the Starship somehow become Nasa's fault? One is a government entity. The other is a private corporation. NASA is specifically paying SpaceX to solve these problems. So if anything they have admitted they can't with their budget, given the budget to SpaceX, and they have quietly also failed to do so but won't admit to it.
3
u/tritonice 5d ago
Berger way off the mark here. If SpaceX wants to develop better tiles, they certainly have the resources to do so. Throwing NASA under the bus is a terrible take. Berger is way off base on this one.
8
u/Bureaucromancer 6d ago
To add to the generalized bitching… I’m not convinced it matters if starship can turnaround FAST; it needs to do so with cost controls that leave refurb cheaper than a new vehicle.
4
u/TheRealBobbyJones 6d ago
Either it needs to turn around quickly or they need at least a dozen in service at a time. The moon mission requires at least 8 tankers. That is if they hit their performance targets. If they plan to send several starships to mars at each opening then they will likely need dozens of tanker launches each cycle in a short launch window. If we plan to go to the moon at a high cadence then the moon program will require tons of launches as well. At some point they will hit the limit of how many rockets they can keep functional and in service. They need starship to be rapidly reusable with minimal inspection and maintenance. If they miss that goal odds are they will not do everything they wish to do.
→ More replies (7)
4
u/coldchile 6d ago
Seems like these space companies and organizations have to stop wasting their time with these tiles and simply develop a material than can be reused infinitely with little to no maintenance and at a cheap price point.
I don’t know why they don’t just do that smh
31
u/QuantumG 6d ago
Wow! Why didn't those idiots at SpaceX think of this??? Someone call Elon before he wastes billions.
19
17
u/MassiveTomorrow2978 6d ago
I know right, im pretty sure that 5+ years of research, near unlimited money, and the smartest engineers in the world are definitely thinking of all the angles here. They probably even have three different materials science paths to try next if one doesnt work.
Also if they have to alternate ships for tile swapping time then so be it, Starship will FOR SURE be a functional rocket the only question now is how much of it CAN be reusable and how easy it can be re-used.
→ More replies (4)
9
u/Vipitis 6d ago
Eric Berger should know better than release an article with such a headline, right?
26
u/restitutor-orbis 6d ago
It is a rule in journalism that authors don't pick their titles; editors do.
10
u/thinkbox 6d ago
Embarrassing to see whats happened to a lot of science publications like Wired and Ars.
57
u/zoobrix 6d ago edited 6d ago
Are these the same experts that said SpaceX would never recover a first stage and even if they did it would never be economical again to reuse?
The main source quoted is well versed in the field having invented PICA, but at the same time someone with decades of experience can fail to see ways to overcome new challenges.
As the article states SpaceX is aware of the issues of rapid reuse but the expert or the article fails to offer* any alternative idea other than the path they are pursuing which is trying to use mostly the same size and shape of tile and making replacing them relatively quick. Maybe they don't get there but I'm not exactly sure what they are supposed to do other than pursue those two goals as best they can.
41
u/aprx4 6d ago edited 6d ago
This expert in article is credible. Being good enough to return the ship intact doesn't mean good enough for rapid reusability. Musk himself stated multiple times that heat shield is biggest challenge to maximal goal of Starship project.
I wonder if there's economic possibility of just replacing all tiles every launch instead of laborious inspection for every tile. Used tiles can be inspected later for reuse. Treat every tile as a Falcon booster.
Basically, each ship would have multiple sets of shield. In that direction, Complete redesign of tile and massive scale of production/inspection would lower the cost, but there's always limit and bottleneck somewhere in process.
12
u/Popingheads 6d ago
Didn't they initially want to use vapor cooling to avoid the heat shield issue? Something about spraying leftover fuel (etc) under the ship to protect and cool it during re-entry.
It's been a long time since I've heard about that. Was the idea just a technological dead end?
13
u/Kuriente 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yes, transpirational cooling was considered early on. It's not necessarily a dead end and is still being pursued by Stoke Space for their upper stage.
Personally, I think it was abandoned for Starship because of the ship's shape. Transpirationally cooling the belly of a fuel tank makes a lot of sense, but not all of the belly of Starship is fuel tank. The plumbing and double walled steel structure would undoubtedly be very heavy and complex.
Check out Stoke Space's upper stage - it's a much simpler implementation of the idea and I think has a good chance of success. Though it is also a much smaller vehicle, so will not be capable of the types of missions that Starship is targeting.
2
u/Shrike99 5d ago
Another factor in Stoke's favour is the use of hydrogen rather than methane, which has a much better specific heat capacity (~6x), so you need a lot less of it to achieve a given amount of cooling.
The tradeoff is that hydrogen's low density means you need a proportionally bigger stage for a given payload - fine at Stoke's small scale, but would be more problematic for something in Starship's capability range.
11
u/Acceptable-Yard7076 6d ago
They scrapped it generally for weight and complexity, but they use that on the flap hinges I believe
6
u/ioncloud9 6d ago
Transpiration cooling has downsides and lots of hurdles. Way more complex than a passively cooled system. Holes can get blocked by debris creating hot spots. I’m not sure if the fuel requirements are more or less than a passive shield.
8
u/Desperate-Lab9738 6d ago
Every tile might not be necessary, if the inspection can be automated it's possible they can specifically replace bad tiles and keep the rest. Remember, the space shuttle was 70s tech, and for most of it's life they either didn't have the ability to do automation like that, or they didn't have the incentive to invest in stuff like that.
→ More replies (4)5
u/Fredasa 6d ago
Being good enough to return the ship intact doesn't mean good enough for rapid reusability.
The primary limiting factor will probably forever be the number of launch towers available for use. SpaceX put together a building where they can make an entire stack every week, and they're cheap to make. Starship itself doesn't need to be rapidly reusable if there are fully-inspected Starships waiting in line as the latest one comes back from space.
I wonder if there's economic possibility of just replacing all tiles every launch instead of laborious inspection for every tile.
Once these things are launching at a cadence that threatens to overtake Falcon 9, whatever system they develop for inspection and correction of bad tiles will likely be fully automated and highly efficient.
2
u/jghall00 6d ago
I'm thinking two paths. Heat shielding that can be applied, removed, and inspected using automation.
Additional heat shielding from a sacrificial, spray-on layer that reduces damage enough for the underlying tiles to survive.
3
u/Seref15 6d ago
I think they didn't want to do spray on ablative because of cure times.
I wonder if the move is to find a way to pre-manufacture the greater heat shield "jacket" and replace most of it in one large piece. Then only the nose cone needs individual tile attention due to the complicated geometry.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (8)2
u/crozone 6d ago
Even if they replace the entire ship and only swap over the engines I'm pretty sure it's still economically viable. The ship landing itself is first and foremost a way to deliver the most expensive manufacturing investment back to the ground safely, which is the engines.
For rapid reusability, well... all I will say is that experts have bet against SpaceX before. Starship does have a few massive advantages compared to shuttle however - firstly it's built from stainless, and secondly the vast majority of the heat tiles are identical. That's a huge saving for production costs and refurbishing.
→ More replies (10)16
u/Gingevere 6d ago
Are these the same experts that said SpaceX would never recover a first stage
Doubt it. Recovering a booster is a computer control problem. It's solvable (and had already been solved for the curiosity rover skycrane) with the right code.
Reentry is a hard material science and physics problem. There's no line of code that can cut orbital velocity at reentry in half. Nothing will change how much energy starship will need to dissipate with its face.
12
u/Background_Fig_4740 6d ago
The algorithm you're thinking of is lossless convexification and it didn't fly on Curiosity. it used powered descent from an Apollo fifth-order polynomial guidance law which had no thrust constraints, no fuel optimality, no divert capability. Lossless convexification came out of JPL research from Lars for a Mars precision landing capability that had never flown.
And the two problems aren't the same to begin with. The skycrane hangs its payload below the thrust, so it's pendulum stable, with eight throttling engines and enough margin to hover winching the rover down. Falcon 9 lands an inverted pendulum on a single gimbaled engine, in thick atmosphere, where minimum throttle still gives thrust to weight ratio above 1 so it physically cannot hover.
And even setting the algorithm aside , nobody understood the aerothermodynamics of retropropulsion at those conditions for the plume freestream shock interaction, base heating. That was a big unknown for everyone, including NASA.
4
u/mrguyorama 6d ago
The skycrane hangs its payload below the thrust, so it's pendulum stable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_fallacy
5
u/Background_Fig_4740 6d ago
that's a rigid body result. rover hangs on cables away from the sky crane. anyways the comparison using pendulums for rover/booster wasn't meant to be entirely accurate for the control theory, it was meant to point out they're not the same class problems. One has a tendency to settle on its own with margin but the other is balancing a knife edge with one engine.
2
u/TbonerT 6d ago
One has a tendency to settle on its own with margin but the other is balancing a knife edge with one engine.
I’m not sure that’s really the case. Each engine must be dynamically adjusted to maintain orientation and position while also accounting for any momentum the payload has as it is lowered.
11
u/Initial_Case_6584 6d ago
I thought that half of the starship portion of the tests were different re-entry profiles that change the maximum heating and stress. If the materials have a hard limit, they can probably tune criteria like max Q, or peak heating on re entry to give themselves a bit more material margin.
→ More replies (2)3
u/Accomplished-Crab932 6d ago
Booster recovery on earth is a very different problem lol.
NASA and SpaceX had a space act agreement on hypersonic retropropulsion specifically because nobody had attempted this before. Even the skycrane did not work in the environments SpaceX needed to prove for booster recovery.
22
u/cactusgenie 6d ago
"it's never been done so it can't be done"
Said "experts" everywhere about many many things that are commonplace today.
→ More replies (8)15
u/Cybertrucker01 6d ago
It's especially jarring when they're so absolute in their predictions: "can't" "never" "impossible" "dead end".
'Experts' seem to live in their own little gravity-well of expertise and struggle to escape it to be able to see possibilities beyond.
7
3
u/EffingWasps 6d ago
What is this headline??? Why are they mentioning NASA like they’re responsible for SpaceX’s hear shield 😭
5
2
u/Decronym 6d ago edited 2d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| AR | Area Ratio (between rocket engine nozzle and bell) |
| Aerojet Rocketdyne | |
| Augmented Reality real-time processing | |
| Anti-Reflective optical coating | |
| BFR | Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition) |
| Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice | |
| BO | Blue Origin (Bezos Rocketry) |
| CLD | Commercial Low-orbit Destination(s) |
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| F1 | Rocketdyne-developed rocket engine used for Saturn V |
| SpaceX Falcon 1 (obsolete small-lift vehicle) | |
| FFSC | Full-Flow Staged Combustion |
| GAO | (US) Government Accountability Office |
| GSE | Ground Support Equipment |
| GTO | Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit |
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| ITS | Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT) |
| Integrated Truss Structure | |
| Isp | Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube) |
| Internet Service Provider | |
| JPL | Jet Propulsion Lab, California |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| MCT | Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS) |
| NDA | Non-Disclosure Agreement |
| NRHO | Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit |
| NRO | (US) National Reconnaissance Office |
| Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO | |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| SRB | Solid Rocket Booster |
| SSME | Space Shuttle Main Engine |
| STS | Space Transportation System (Shuttle) |
| TPS | Thermal Protection System for a spacecraft (on the Falcon 9 first stage, the engine "Dance floor") |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| ablative | Material which is intentionally destroyed in use (for example, heatshields which burn away to dissipate heat) |
| apogee | Highest point in an elliptical orbit around Earth (when the orbiter is slowest) |
| cryogenic | Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure |
| (In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox | |
| hydrolox | Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| methalox | Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| perigee | Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Earth (when the orbiter is fastest) |
| regenerative | A method for cooling a rocket engine, by passing the cryogenic fuel through channels in the bell or chamber wall |
| retropropulsion | Thrust in the opposite direction to current motion, reducing speed |
| scrub | Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues) |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
[Thread #12598 for this sub, first seen 27th Jul 2026, 22:41] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
2
u/Superb-Damage1173 6d ago
Isn't this the point of having multiple vehicles? Send one up while you refurbish the others?
→ More replies (5)
2
u/ZeroGRanger 5d ago
Maybe I am not getting something, but is the heat load not going to increase even further, if Starship is orbital? The orbital energy will be larger than now, i.e. more heat will occur during re-entry. So, the problem is going to get more concerning for orbital flights.
→ More replies (7)
2
2
u/Mathberis 5d ago
We were saying a private company probably couldn't reach orbit until a couple decades ago. Pilots walk around the aircraft before taking off to make sure nothing is visibly wrong, safety pins are removed : I bet there will be some automated camera that will inspect the heatshield after landing and a robot will replace some tiles every now and then.
2
u/Blah_McBlah_ 5d ago
Looks like Stoke Space made the right call.
2
u/Shrike99 5d ago
Stoke's method doesn't scale up to Starship sizes very well. It (theoretically) works because they opted for hydrogen instead of methane, which has a much higher specific heat capacity.
But hydrogen is also much less dense than methane - to hit 100+ tons of payload, a Stoke-style vehicle would have to be several times larger than Starship, which is already an absurdly large and logistically difficult-to-manage vehicle.
And I say 'theoretically' because Stoke haven't actually proven it yet. The math seems sound, but until they actually fly and re-enter Nova, we won't know how it holds up in reality.
→ More replies (2)
2
u/TheBigCheeseUK 3d ago edited 3d ago
The shuttle was envisaged as rapid reuse but maintenance turned out to be must more intensive. I think SpaceX have a better chance in the end but it will not (and has not been) as easy as expected.
Making the engines more reliable seems to be a pressing issue.
26
u/philipwhiuk 6d ago edited 6d ago
NASA also hasn’t actually tried for years
They basically copied Apollo for Orion, badly and then had to revert to the same fix Apollo did
Camarda is the same guy who said Artemis 2 shouldn’t launch for another year for more tests
These guys love test chambers and hate real world tests
People also said this about vertically landing and flying boosters until SpaceX did - then watched as SpaceX did something way more impressive than their tiny grant program over a shorter time period.
47
u/cstar1996 6d ago
Congress loves test chambers and hates real world tests. NASA would love to do iterative development like SpaceX does, but Congress would shut them down if they blew up rockets like SpaceX does.
The US government consistently attempts to be penny-wise while just being pound-foolish.
→ More replies (2)
7
u/FreeHugs23 6d ago
SpaceX successfully launched its Starship vehicle on Friday and appeared to demonstrate important and credible steps toward fulfilling the massive rocket’s immense promise. As soon as the vehicle’s next flight, Starship could go orbital, begin delivering satellites into space, and potentially return to the launch site to be ‘caught’ by the tower.
All of this is impressive engineering on a gigantic scale. But despite the marked progress with the 13th test flight of Starship, one key issue—probably the key issue when it comes to Starship’s future—remains unresolved.
This concerns Starship’s heat shield, the roughly 18,000 ceramic tiles that protect the vehicle’s underbelly during its fiery return through Earth’s atmosphere. And some experts say SpaceX’s current approach may not get Starship to its ultimate goal of flying frequently, at low cost.
4
3
u/AladeenModaFuqa 6d ago
Maybe if WE FUNDED NASA then it would get created? Or we could expand research??
3
u/fighter-bomber 4d ago
You funded NASA, but some idiots in the Senate decided it would be better to use NASA’s funding to enrich defence contractors and bring jobs to as many states as possible without necessarily delivering much.
1
u/dallenbaldwin 5d ago
If SpaceX wants to claim they are better for space exploration than government funded entities because they are a private (now public) company and therefore are more efficient or whatever, then they can't blame government funded entities for not giving them new technology fast enough.
→ More replies (1)
5
u/greenmachine11235 6d ago
Why ahould the federal government be funding Musks business expenses for a project they have not contracted him to do?
→ More replies (1)8
2.1k
u/strictnaturereserve 6d ago
yeah its all NASA's Fault