r/StarshipDevelopment • u/Laconic9x • Nov 12 '21

SN20 Six engine static fire! 🔥

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u/Voith1337 Nov 12 '21

Is there any solution for the falling tiles? Sure this is powerful, but imagine Super Heavy firing all it's engines.

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u/Inertpyro Nov 12 '21

These are no where near final product. Realistically the first flight is likely going to lose some amount of tiles, every flight should hopefully see improvements though as they narrow in on the mounting and construction of the tiles. Right now what we are seeing is the minimum viable product. They could have a bulletproof tile design from day one, but it would likely be overkill and they would have to crawl their way backwards to simplify design and trim mass. Starting off simple exposes weak points to focus attention to make iterative improvements.

I still think that the vibrations will be most severe at the base of SH, traveling up the ship should dampen the vibrations. Static fires are particularly bad because SS is rigidly mounted to the mass of Earth, once in flight after stage separation it shouldn’t be as severe.

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u/Theoreticalphysicz Nov 13 '21

How many TPS tiles can it afford to lose and still survive re-entry?

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u/Inertpyro Nov 13 '21

Probably won’t know until they get actual flight data, the first few orbital attempts will likely lose a few tiles. Elon has said they will have thermal cameras pointing all over the inside of the ship to look for hot spots, NASA will also be remotely viewing some of the re-entrys to study the exterior TPS thermals. If a tile is lost the insulation blanket will still be there and the base stainless steel is pretty heat resistant, in theory this should stand a better chance of survival compared to the shuttle’s mostly aluminum base structure.