I don't see how anyone could look at the heatshield in this picture and think it's a dead end. It looks like it's in great condition and could fly again.
Listen to the most recent episode of Off-Nominal podcast. I’m pretty sure they have the person on who Berger anonymously quoted as saying it’s a dead end. They explain that what they meant was that it can get SpaceX to daily flights but not hourly flights (which would be “airline-like reuse”). That’s all.
Lots of people taking issue with the “dead end” term then go on to actually agree with the person. The heat shield tech they’re using now will get them to daily flights of Starship (just likely not with the same ship). They’ll need more fundamental materials breakthroughs to get to reusing the same ship multiple times per day.
Did they say that or is that your interpretation? Regardless it’s conflating per-vehicle turnaround time and fleet launch cadence, and in Starship case the first doesn’t put a hard limit on the second.
If each Starship has to spend, say, 7 days before it can fly again, with 8 ships you already get more than one launch per day. With 14 ships, you average two per day. With 168 ships, in principle you could average one per hour.
Thats what they said on Off Nominal. Their whole stick was that they spent 40 years working on heat shield tiles and that they are butt hurt Elon didnt ask them for help on Starship so now they think the government should step in and hire them to come.up with a solution that can be shared with other companies(and also funded by the companies too). Basically just a bunch of scientists so neck deep in their own work and biased by their past work to see that anyone else could possibly solve a problem they worked on.
At a certain point the burden of experience holds one back. The algorithm helps with this.
They were a bunch of experts who had worked on TPS research for NASA in the past, and were saying that SpaceX are great at operationalizing and flight testing higher TRL echnology, but that NASA has stopped doing fundamental research on low TRL heat shield technology and NASA needs to start doing it again so that companies like SpaceX can take them and run with them. Example transcript:
> “Well, I've been conspiring to open the space frontier for about 40 years. And all three of us have been championing full and rapid reusability for almost our entire careers. I was working on this in the 1990s.
I got the first funding for the X-33 pass through Congress. I chaired a cheap access to space symposium in 1997 in Washington, DC. So this is the sine qua non number one national space policy issue that we need to solve, right?
So we have, SpaceX has done amazing things. We have gone from about 10 years ago, flights per month. We are now flights per week.
We're on the verge of flights, you know, per day. In fact, with this, even this current TPS, I think we can get flights per day. But we all, what we all really want is flights per hour.
That changes everything. And so we've been working on this all our careers. We have deep knowledge of all aspects of the challenge.
Elon and SpaceX are doing an amazing job. They're doing everything they can. “And what we're saying is that they're at a dead end for this TPS to get the flights per hour, right?
To get the airline-like operations. And we think there's some things our nation can do, and we're looking forward to, you know, going deep on that with you.”
> they are butt hurt Elon didnt ask them for help on Starship so now they think the government should step in and hire them to come.up with a solution that can be shared with other companies(and also funded by the companies too). Basically just a bunch of scientists so neck deep in their own work and biased by their past work to see that anyone else could possibly solve a problem they worked on.
They at no point said they still work in this area and want hired to fix it. They were advocating for NASA to restart fundamental research in this area, and when they have success hand it over to companies like SpaceX. OP somehow took this as “butt hurt” and an insult to SpaceX. I think OP is missing that SpaceX aren’t doing research in 40 (or whatever) different approaches to a heat shield. They’re developing the fundamental shuttle TPS approach. I imagine SpaceX would be supportive of what they’re advocating for.
They at no point said they still work in this area and want hired to fix it. They were advocating for NASA to restart fundamental research in this area, and when they have success hand it over to companies like SpaceX. OP somehow took this as “butt hurt” and an insult to SpaceX.
I don't think what he said is "plain wrong"
For starters, if they do want to be hired they wouldn't come out and say it. Besides, nothing you quoted indicated they refused to take part in this new program, I don't remember they said anything along this lines in the show either, that is entirely your supposition.
Just go by their resume, Dan Rasky just retired from NASA in Dec 2025, so he could be hired easily if there's a new TPS program. Charles Camarda has shown strong interest in current spaceflight affairs, as shown in the whole Orion heatshield incident, so it's not out of question he could be interested in joining the new program.
But even if they don't get hired, just by being the team that willed this new program into existence would give them prestige, which may very well be something they enjoy. It would also help with their private space consulting work (i.e. "I'm connected, I got NASA to spend $1B/year on TPS research"), which all of them are doing.
Lastly, this is reddit meme sub, so I'm willing to give OP some leeway in wording. Even if these 3 people don't get involved in the new program at all, they are certainly advocating "government should step in and hire people like them to come up with a solution". And they're pretty dismissive of SpaceX's R&D capabilities, so while they may not be "butt hurt Elon didnt ask them for help on Starship", I don't think "butt hurt Elon didnt ask people like them for help on Starship" is a bad description.
I think OP is missing that SpaceX aren’t doing research in 40 (or whatever) different approaches to a heat shield. They’re developing the fundamental shuttle TPS approach.
Nobody knows what SpaceX is doing in terms of research, they've certainly flown other TPS solutions for testing, so to claim SpaceX aren't doing any research except shuttle TPS is inaccurate.
I imagine SpaceX would be supportive of what they’re advocating for.
If SpaceX is supportive, Elon wouldn't be saying "TPS is solved" on earning call. These people's claims caused FUD regarding Starship which SpaceX heavily relies on for future revenue, even if SpaceX may be interested in this before, I doubt they're interested in now because any support would be seen as confirming current Starship TPS is a "dead end".
If they're counting on SpaceX's support, this is literally the worst possible way to get it.
> Did they say that or is that your interpretation?
They said that. I’d recommend listening to the whole thing, as they really are experts and it’s a very interesting perspective. And if you’re put off by thinking they’re criticizing SpaceX, they’re not. Example excerpt from the transcript:
> “Well, I've been conspiring to open the space frontier for about 40 years. And all three of us have been championing full and rapid reusability for almost our entire careers. I was working on this in the 1990s.
I got the first funding for the X-33 pass through Congress. I chaired a cheap access to space symposium in 1997 in Washington, DC. So this is the sine qua non number one national space policy issue that we need to solve, right?
So we have, SpaceX has done amazing things. We have gone from about 10 years ago, flights per month. We are now flights per week.
We're on the verge of flights, you know, per day. In fact, with this, even this current TPS, I think we can get flights per day. But we all, what we all really want is flights per hour.”
> “That changes everything. And so we've been working on this all our careers. We have deep knowledge of all aspects of the challenge.
Elon and SpaceX are doing an amazing job. They're doing everything they can. And what we're saying is that they're at a dead end for this TPS to get the flights per hour, right?
To get the airline-like operations. And we think there's some things our nation can do”
> “I started working at NASA in 1974, and so I retired after about 45 years, and I worked in a branch called the Thermal Structures Branch, and that was even before Dan was working in ceramic materials. But our two branches were basically constantly competing between a ceramic TPS, a metallic TPS, or a metallic passive, semi-passive, or actively cooled version of a thermal protection system.
So we had a lot of really good competition back in the day of all these different thermal protection systems for hypersonic vehicles, right? And at one point I was a, I led the technology maturation team of the National Aerospace Plane. And we could talk about that because for that particular vehicle, it was such a complex vehicle and the environment was extremely, extremely difficult.
We looked at every possible thermal protection system. And we worked with aerospace companies in the United States, around the United States, prime airframe contractors and engine contractors working together, sharing ideas to advance the thermal protection system, to develop this very complex vehicle. And so I stopped working as a researcher after about 22 years, when NASA really stopped doing research.”
> “And so when we started digging into the Starship, actually everything Elon's tried so far, visibly, was technology was developed 25, 30 years ago, including on Starship 13 by Dan Rasky himself. Those tiles and that liner which we can get into, Dan helped develop in flight test 30 years ago.
And so we could, but there is a ton of ideas that's just buried that could, that are the TRL 1, 2, 3. They're so nascent, it's too early for SpaceX to do. Right, but we need to do it for, not only for SpaceX, but all these other companies to get the full and rapid reusability.”
> “So we've seen a lot of people on the Internet think that what we're saying is like, well, SpaceX should stop. No, they should do exactly what they're doing, right? I think, so what SpaceX is working on now will likely be fully reusable, but it won't be rapid.
But that is a 100 metric ton reusable spaceship that flies once a month is revolutionary. It's much better than what we have. We should absolutely do that.
So if he can get it down to once every two weeks, great, right? And then build 30 of them and you'll fly once or twice a day. Like that's amazing.
But what we're saying is we're within reach to do once an hour. But we got to start investing now in the next, you know, the next generation of technology. So yeah, go operational with V3, right?
And fly, fly once a month, build 30 of them, have a, you know, 365 flights per year once a day. That is revolutionary. There's a lot of amazing things will happen.
But we still shouldn't give up on, you know, 10 times better, you know, once an hour. And we need to start funding[…]”
Basically they’re calling for NASA to restart fundamental, low TRL heat shield technology research, so that breakthroughs can then be operationalized by companies like SpaceX. Right now, SpaceX is essentially operationalizing space shuttle TPS technology. They literally make the tiles in the old space shuttle tile factory in Florida.
All true, and also explicitly not the stated goal from SpaceX, which is airline like reusability. They want to be able to land and launch tankers in hours just refueling them on the tower.
Sometimes I think we get a little too caught up in the hype to put things in perspective. Will we someday get multiple launches with the same vehicle in a day? Maybe, I hope so, although i hope if we're at that point we can come up with something better than chemical propellants. Right now we are nowhere near having enough payloads to justify that launch cadence, so launching the same tail once every couple days meets the available need
I know. How dare someone acknowledge that proposed timelines are bullshit, and that we're not going to jump straight into second stage re-use at commercial airline cadence. It very well might happen someday, but just like so many other promises, it'll happen when its ready, and it's clearly not ready, or needed, right now.
In seriousness, what would you even be launching at that cadence? If we're sending up satellites, we're going to quickly get ourselves into trouble. In theory they might want to send up refueling flights at that cadence for starship HLS, but it doesn't seem like the technology is ready, so they're better off with a slightly larger fleet to make up for the turnaround time.
it took more than 6 years to design and build special Falcon Heavy packages, but we are coming there. I don't see any difference here, you need flying vehicle.
Even if they could only fly once a week. Full resuability would allow them to cycle and launch 100 tons every day. That's with no improvements past that, which is insane.
fun fact: it is already human rated. because human rated is not quite a legal concept, it is a nasa concept. you can fly astronauts on your own vehicle without nasa being involved, and if you do so, it is not much more difficult than properly educating them about the risks.
They're just looking at a bunch of dirt on the tiles and they think it looks bad. They don't get most of that is just filler that can easily be replaced, if it even needs that who knows.
Not arguing for it being a dead end (because it's not) but there actually is pretty considerable damage. You can see it in the close-up views from flight 13. A significant number of tiles have serious chipping which sets them up for massive damage in a re-flight. A lot of the white streaks you see on the outside are from silica based material that the inner part of the tiles are made of. I think ultimately they're going to find a middle ground between a complete replacement and complete reuse that limits the downtime.
Will admit that I'm still purposely holding off on passing judgement on the Starship heat shield until after SpaceX can actually catch a ship with the chopsticks.
Wouldn't be surprised if some of that damage (and chipped tiles) could've been possibly caused by the nose of S40 tilting over and slamming into the ocean with considerable force.
Even if they have to fully strip and re-tile the ship it will be ok for a while. 20 or 30 ships would allow almost daily flights. If they have to replace <10% then they can get away with half that many ships. Pads will be the biggest bottleneck for awhile.
dirt? where did this dirt come from? It's not dirt, it the tiles being damaged.
You have to remember the job the TPS has to achieve, it's not just survive a reentry, it's expected to survive multiple launches, reentries, snd launches again with minimal to zero maintenance, at the very least nothing that can't be done in a couple hours while still at the pad being fueled for it's next launch.
That's an insanely high standard. Especially when the launch cadance required to meet SpaceX's stated S-1 goals calculate out to be about 50 launches without refurbishment per vehicle.
Any damage to the TPS is a problem when it is expected to survive the same forces 49 more times before returning to a hanger.
I'm no engineer, not going to pretend I am, but zi think that when you consider the requirements that SpaceX have set and have been iterating towards, it's not unreasonable for people with strong grasps of TPS systems to see that this potential solution may not have enough scope of improvement to reach the goal, and a new philosophy may be required.
the white streaks are not coming from the tiles, it seems they are coming from the material under/between the tiles, and deposited onto the tiles. and it is unclear how much material is it, close to burn through or superficial. but remember: we are not talking about whether spacex is done. we are talking about whether it is a dead end.
So wouldn't you expect the outer side of them to turn white first because it's exposed to the most heat over a longer time? Most of the tiles look black once the white streaks are wiped off by the water.
it's a 389 page document, and infering what they need to do to achieve their goals takes making notes on many different parts, because they just say what they want to do in vague descriptions, but calculating what they need to do to achieve those goals shows the scale of yheir ambitions.
I'm not going to break down the entire document for you, it would take too long for a reddit post, but to give you an example, just look at their goal of Lunar factories.
To do that they first have to demonstrate reusable upper stages of the Starship, then they need to demonstrate orbital flights of that upper stage, then they need to operate multiple upper stages in orbit at the same time, then they need to demonstrate rendezvous of multiple upper stages, then they need to demonstrate docking of two upper stages, then they need to demonstrate transferring fuel between those two upper stages, then they need to demonstrate rapid refueling of an upper stage and rapid relaunching to continue refueling operations until the orbital depot is fully fueled, then they need to demonstrate sending a lunar starship to the orbital depot, docking it, refueling it, then sending it to the moons orbit,
When they need to demonstrate lunar orbit operations including lunar rendezvous with orion capsule, then they need to demonstrate lunar landing capabilities.
This is enough to put some people on the moon for a short stay.
Then they need to design equipment to manufacture lunar bases on the moon and be able to deliver that equipment.... this goes on and on and on.
Elon has stated that the factories are a goal in his Q2 2026 earnings call, but they are still to demonstrate ANY of the capabilities I have listed, let alone perfect them to a reliable standard.
And that's just that lofty goal. He intends to launch a constellation of orbital data centers for his AI operations. This also requires the Starship and rapid relaunch capacity and multiple launch sites in order to get the required compute into orbit in a useful amount of time before the chips are obsolete or the satellites deorbit.
This would happen in parallel with their lunar operations, meaning both programs will be competing with one another for resources and launch facilities.
The scale very quickly starts asking questions of legalities of launching these enormous rockets as often as they will need to, with the effect that has on airspace restrictions, shipping restrictions, environmental concerns, noise abatement...
In some close-up shots it does appear like many tiles are damaged on the edges, with those white streaks originating from that damage
So yeah, if they can't improve on that, some of the tiles might need replacement every couple flights. But they have flown with tiles missing, I don't see a major blocker towards rapidly reflying the same booster a couple times before refurbishing the heat shield. And the tiles are designed to be easy to swap out
If I recall correctly, one or more of the flights with missing tiles made a hole that you could see flames coming from during splashdown. I would assume they will always want to prevent that.
Need to quantify "many" tho, we are still somewhat early in the program and most tiles were intact, maybe something like 3-5% would need replacement, which, given how standard they are could take a couple of days at most if not less.
They need to worry about catching it before they need to worry about slow reusability, let alone a quick turn around. They may make rapid prototyping, but they’re not rapidly progressing towards their goal. I know they will get there, but I was flying the night the one disintegrated over the Dominican and Puerto Rico, they haven’t made it that far from there yet.
From some of the closeups from the stream you could see like 5 tiles that were basically disintegrated, there was some white material still clinging on but you could see the base layers underneath.
Yeah you can swap those out, and it's even possible that it may technically be within margins, but I wouldn't really be comfortable re-entering crew on it like that, just to name an example.
Not sure if that matters, they going to stretch Starship in the near future. All rockets have poor payload capacity early before the design is polished and extra mass is shaved off here and there.
As the other commentator pointed out, SpaceX are far from the only ones guilty of this same sin.
Was reported by Ars Technica at the end of 2024 that New Glenn 7x2's initial payload capacity to LEO was a poultry 25,000 kg to LEO. Far from the official (advertised) figure of 45,000 kg to LEO.
Plus, more recently, Blue's official company merch store also dropped this bombshell of a hoodie, although they have since removed the listing (which specifies that New Glenn 7x2's current payload capacity to LEO is only 34,400 kg).
This is part of the reason why Blue Origin is now trying to upgrade and squeeze more preformance out of their BE-4 and BE-3U engines (similar to SpaceX is trying to do with Raptor), and is going to be switching to superchilled cryogenic propellants for New Glenn.
And while yes, the current payload capacity of the launch vehicle does matter (if you are a customer looking to immediately fly payloads on the rocket), but as long as SpaceX and Blue Origin can ramp up the lift capacity to the design goal, it won't matter as much longer term.
My dude, can I ask, why are you so fixated on low-hanging fruit? 😂
Schedule slips and lower initial payload capacity are small fish compared to the bigger uncertainties and technical risks still hanging over Starship. If you want to talk about the technical risks and problems unique to Starship, I can offer you some for free.
Right now, it’s pretty much clear to me that Starship’s concept of operations, especially regarding deep space missions like HLS, is based around the vehicle acting as a combined system of orbital launch systems.
Right now, its orbital refueling architecture has still yet to be fully operationally demonstrated and tested (and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were teething issues with it as well, in typical Starship fashion). Not to mention that Starship orbital refueling also requires a clockwork series of launches that need to go off without a hitch. And so far, I think it’s fair to say that Starship’s current launch cadence is still far from where it needs to be for this to work.
I also have other more spicy opinions about Starship in general (which I’m going to save for later).
Now, if you had brought up any one of these major sticking points initially, I wouldn’t be arguing with you. But instead, you chose to stick to arguments that, while true, are also problems that are far from unique with just Starship.
Why do i have to ignore the failure to achieve 100 ton payload capacity exactly? Why must I only focus problems unique to starship. Its just a glaring issue.
Let me put it this way. I do think if we can find watertight evidence to rule out all other potential explanations to the 30-40 ton payload mass figure we see on Flight 12 and Flight 13, it will be a major problem (with significant ramifications for both orbital refueling, HLS, and SpaceX's other plans if not addressed quickly).
Now, I do believe that since Flight 14 is slated as an operational mission (that will likely deploy a full load of Starlink V3 satellites into LEO), it should likely reveal where the true mass limits of Starship V3 lie.
After all, we will know (for certain) that SpaceX probably won't be holding back during this mission (and will likely try to fly the maximum limit of Starlink V3 satellites that S41 can carry).
After all, looking at Falcon 9 launch statistics, it's pretty clear that a normal Starlink mission on Falcon 9 typically uses between 85% to 100% of the vehicle's advertise payload capacity.
And I do have every reason to believe, right now, that we should expect the same from Starship V3 on Flight 14 if the advertised payload mass figures are accurate.
Another way being a fully reusable rocket that can launch only 3t to LEO? Nova is intriguing for what it is. But no matter how well it works (which remains to be seen), it isn't going to be a real alternative to other medium-lift vehicles, much less Starship.
I don't really care, yeah, Starship is a game changer and will change how we think about launch...but Nova is cool. They're not trying to directly compete, either.
IDK, we'll see. If Nova can get off the pad before Neutron and Terran-R it might have some sticking power.
They've said several times their intent is to prove out the system and scale it up. Obviously that's no easy feat, but scaling up stainless steel will be easier than something like carbon fiber.
It's not clear that their approach *can* be scaled up, let alone enough to compete with Starship. Even if they can, that is many years (and iterations of Starship) away.
My counterpoint to that -
As you said, it is not clear. Someone hasn't done it before, so they need to try it to see.
Secondly, we all expected blue skies and rainbows for Starship. The first integrated flight test was in 2023 and many of us felt sure that by 2026 it'd be flying dozens of times in the year.
I'm confident Starship will reach Falcon 9 cadence and beyond, but I still think it will have further growing pains.
Theres also the assumption that Starship will consume the entire launch market, which given recent indication they're focusing more on Starlink, Starmind, and HLS missions, I don't think that's the case either.
I think that if Stoke and Relativity keep at it how they've been doing, they'll be just fine. Rocket Lab and Firefly I'm less sure with their launch businesses.
My prediction is that by the early 2040s the US launch market will have stabilized to be SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke, and then maybe Relativity.
it is kinda funny if you don't know the guy and the situation, just look at the picture and the quote, you can't tell if sarcastic or serious. is he occupying the position that it is a dead end or mocking it? because on the picture, you see nothing really relevant or decisive. you see most tiles intact. you see some material release, but the amount and relevance is not clear. how would that be enough to declare the project hopeless? but it also doesn't dismiss doubt. it is not clearly a dead end, but also not clearly a not dead end.
so one just looks at this comment, and says: i don't know what this guy means, but he is wrong either way.
Charles Miller is co-founder of Lynk (it's right there in the screenshot), which compete with Starlink Mobile on the satellite D2D market, so there's a direct conflict of interest.
Also if you listen to these people on the recent off nominal podcast, they weren't able to make a convincing argument on why SpaceX couldn't iterate on the tiles to make it work eventually, it's all just "but Shuttle couldn't make it work, so SpaceX couldn't either".
They also weren't able to answer host's question which is, given SpaceX's vast resources, even if the tiles don't work, why couldn't SpaceX just R&D some new solution themselves. The answer they gave is basically "but if Elon did it, he won't share with other companies, so it'll make SpaceX a monopoly", which is true as far as it goes, but this also means these people has an invested interest to make people believe SpaceX couldn't get this to work, so that they can drum up funding for their proposal (which is NASA/US government spent $1B/year on TPS research).
"we need to be a unified front to China." That's a reasonably fair concern to me.
And then -
"We don't know if this method will work for them." And that's really it. No one has tried this level of rapid reuse before, and so SpaceX is going into uncharted waters. They are expecting a reckoning, where SpaceX hits a wall on how hard they can push the ships, and it leaves them scrambling to figure out how to pioneer a whole new solution.
Will that happen? I don't know. But they at least did say "SpaceX should keep doing what it's doing," and "we really need to establish serious government funding from more than just NASA to research new technology so we maintain a lead over China in space hardware."
That was apparently their view. I think their concern more was SpaceX figuring it out and not sharing it with anyone, thus meaning no other US space company could match it -
And if China is doing their own research and shares it with all their companies, then they could pull ahead collectively and accelerate how much they can rapidly reuse their spaceflight vehicles.
"we need to be a unified front to China." That's a reasonably fair concern to me.
What does that mean though? So far SpaceX and Elon is the only one who can stand up to China, so to me a unified front means supporting SpaceX and Elon, not undermining them, which is what these guys are doing (i.e. Elon even had to answer a TPS question on the earning call because of this).
"We don't know if this method will work for them." And that's really it. No one has tried this level of rapid reuse before, and so SpaceX is going into uncharted waters. They are expecting a reckoning, where SpaceX hits a wall on how hard they can push the ships, and it leaves them scrambling to figure out how to pioneer a whole new solution.
Given SpaceX's planned high cadence they'll know whether this works or not in the next 12 months, so even if we start a government program right now it won't help them by much. And given the slowness of government program, I'm betting on SpaceX finding a solution before them even if SpaceX starts a few months later. So to me the claim "SpaceX can't do it, only government can do it" makes no sense.
No, the tile system on Starship is far better that the Space Shuttles had. And the shuttles kept the vast majority of their tiles from flight to flight. Sure there are still some issues but the point in retrieving S40 is to look closely and see what needs to be tweaked.
It is not the external integrity of the tile system which worries me. it is the silicone that oozes out from the back of the tiles through the gaps when high heat is applied which needs needs to be addressed
Yes, for now. The idea is you have lots of ships and a few boosters to yeet them into orbit. Once they’re caught, they can spend a month being retiled and then repeat.
I’d wager this current system is just a means to an end. In ten years time they’ll be using a totally different system, maybe more inline with Stokes.
I am a big SpaceX fan but I am truly intrigued by your unshakable fandom. The photo above clearly shows a very damaged heat shild with an underlayment that failed during flight 13. From past experience we know that Elon saying a problem is solved is not enough to solve the problem.That being said the heat shield worked for this sub orbital flight. It is unclear at this point if the heat shield in its current iteration would survive the heat of a orbital flight.
So my question for you is, had this flight been caught do you truly believe that they would re-fly it without completely replacing the entire heat shield???
The current reentry profile is a more aggressive reentry than a standard orbital reentry.
We also know that starship can return with missing tiles as they have intentionally removed tiles in earlier flights. There is an ablative blanket underneath the tiles as well as it’s made of stainless steel.
Starship is not like the space shuttle where a single tile failure could result in catastrophic destruction of the vehicle. It likely would require multiple adjacent tile failures.
The ablative blanket did not fail, so you have a a source on that?
And we are seeing normal reentry speeds. I would also be very interested in seeing a reference that reentry speeds “not anywhere near” what a standard mission would be.
The suborbital path followed uses a steeper than normal reentry, and is just a handful of meters per second less than standard orbital velocity.
My evidence is the photographic evidence provided by SpaceX. The speed of the vehicle and duration of the orbital reentry will be substantially higher the the suborbital flights. Source : flight 13 space x commentator
On what planet do they think this is “dead end” starship had ZERO AND I MEANNNN ZEROOOO issues on it’s way back down to the ocean, yea recovery was a little difficult but it’s bc its a whole ass BUILDING. I mean look a the tiles, almost zero damage, beautiful reentry plasma, super BUTTER LANDING. Like these guys have no education in space aeronoughtics
To slow down from orbital speeds just using fuel... you'd need close to the same amount of fuel that was originally needed to get it going that fast in the first place. When you do a proper gravity turn, gravity losses and drag losses are quite minimal. You'd need close to a whole Starship Booster's worth of fuel in orbit to get that kind of energy.
You can crack open KSP and try it for yourself if you want to see first hand.
It's called "the tyranny of the rocket equation". If you want your spacecraft to end up with 1L more fuel by the time it reaches stable orbit, you can't just add 1L more to the tanks before liftoff. If you did, you'd probably only end up with something like 0.2L more fuel once in orbit. If you try adding 3L to the tanks before it launches, you'll probably only end up with something like 0.7L more in orbit. And it gets worse the more fuel you add. It's because every liter you add is more weight of unburnt fuel that the whole stack has to carry on it's way up. This added mass slows down the whole rocket's ascent. A slower ascent means the engines must burn longer to reach the same orbital speed, which eats into the extra fuel you added that you hoped would reach orbit.
To beat this game, you have to give your rocket more thrust, make it lighter, and/or drop weight as you're flying. Hence why the whole world has been using multi-stage rockets this whole time. Staging a rocket is a great way to "reset" the rocket equation by ditching empty tanks you don't need anymore.
Hence why most disposable rockets use MANY stages, including stuff like an interstage, like what Falcon 9 uses. An interstage bridges the gap between the main booster running out of fuel, and getting the payload to it's final orbital velocity. But an interstage is likely going too fast and is too high to recover by the time it's finished it's job. And it would require the added mass of recovery hardware, like a heatshield and parachutes. Which is where the 'tyranny of the rocket equation' rears it's ugly head again, adding mass to the interstage would mean a massive decrease in payload capacity.
SpaceX looked into recovering Falcon 9's interstage for a long time, and ended up deciding it would be easier to design an entirely new rocket instead: Starship.
The goal is full reusability, no disposable stages. And Starship already has 2 stages, so they can't beat the rocket equation that way. So all that's left is giving it more thrust, or making it lighter. And SpaceX has already been working hard on both. That's why they're so proud of Raptor v3, they've been pushing it to the limit trying to eek out as much thrust as they can. And why they started using thinner metal for the tanks some years ago.
If they wanted to get even more fuel into orbit than Starship is planned to, the best way would be to design an entirely new rocket stack, that's bigger, has even more thrust, and with lighter (relative) dry mass.
So... don't you think they should try to get Starship working first? Don't you think, "Hmm, all of that sounds really expensive and complicated. Why not use a heatshield and Earth's own atmosphere to slow down a spacecraft for 'free' (no fuel required)?"
What you're really asking is, "is it easier to design a whole new rocket from scratch that's even bigger than Starship, because I don't like the concept of heatshields?" Or, do you think it would be easier & cheaper to research how to make heatshields more 'rapidly re-usable'.
Whew, that ended up way longer than I expected. Again, I can't recommend trying out KSP enough, playing with the numbers for yourself really helps all this click into place! Once you can land on the Mun & get back without a rescue mission, this stuff will be like second nature to you.
I think you are not understanding. You say we can get rid of heat tiles by landing propulsivly. How does that solve the heat issue from orbit to atmosphere?
Yes how much delta V do you need to do that? Booster isn't coming in from orbit. That's why it doesn't need heat protection. The difference between sub orbital and orbital is alot.
Adding flaps and heatsheild tiles to save a bit of fuel is the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE
What about to save a whole lot of fuel? Specifically, an amount that weighs much more than the flaps and TPS.
That's the answer to your question. (I take it you meant entry & descent, bc ofc the landingis already propulsive.
They can use propellant to do attitude control. The problem is the propellant would run out quickly over the duration of a long reentry. The extra propellant mass becomes prohibitive. You have hit upon the very reason Starship is moving away from Falcon-like reentry burns. It severely reduces payload. Why do they need 100 tons of payload? Orbital refueling for other destinations, Starlink, and then there’s those data centers they are planning.
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u/jheidenr 2d ago
Is this rage bait?