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Starship's Tenth Flight Test

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364 points metalman | 3 comments | 26 Aug 25 23:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pram ◴[27 Aug 25 00:52 UTC] No.45034189[source]▶
Are the tiles on Starship going to need replacing after flight like the Shuttle? There isn’t a permanent material that can handle all the heat yet? Serious question, my space expertise is only from KSP.
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floating-io ◴[27 Aug 25 00:58 UTC] No.45034232[source]▶
Remains to be seen. That's what they want, but it's never been done before. (edit: clarity: they do NOT want to replace them after each flight.)

They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two).

I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before launching again.

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1. ericcumbee ◴[27 Aug 25 01:08 UTC] No.45034287[source]▶
Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut down the time to replace a single tile down to minutes instead of the hours it took with the shuttle. The Tiles are also alot more standardized so they can be more mass produced than shuttle tiles.
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2. floating-io ◴[27 Aug 25 01:38 UTC] No.45034487[source]▶
Absolutely!

I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.

To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.

And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

3. dotancohen ◴[30 Aug 25 21:19 UTC] No.45078108[source]▶

  > the pattern was different between the different orbiters.
I had never heard this before. Do you have anything to back this up? Asking as a huge space shuttle fan.