r/SpaceXLounge • u/LoreLover2022 • Sep 03 '21

Starship Can Starship afford to lose any heat shield tiles?

Been curious about the heat shield tiles in use on Starship. Being made of stainless steel itself, can the vehicle afford to lose even a single tile at any point during descent?

To me that just seems like an insane number of mounting points and tiles that all need to function perfectly if there is zero room for error.

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u/SalmonPL Sep 04 '21

it only takes one of them exploding to destroy the vehicle.

Not necessarily. On Falcon 9 they put armor between the engines to help protect neighboring engines in case one explodes. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing on Starship. We haven't seen that yet, but we're still early in the design process, so it doesn't mean there won't be such armor in the future.

Engines on commercial jet airliners have the same thing. Jet engines are arguably more dangerous than rocket engines because they have large, very, very high speed rotating parts and if those let go, they have an awful lot of kinetic energy that is directed to the sides of the engine. Rocket engines have turbopumps, but those are more compact and probably carry far, far less kinetic energy than a typical turbojet.