[laughing_man]

All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights.

There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.

[fooblaster]

You know a whole the size of a quarter can wreck the entire spacecraft and make it effectively throw away? Also, you'd want to use this many times. Making a system robust while not requiring months of refurbishment is really really hard.

[ceejayoz]

The Space Shuttle had that problem because it was aluminum with a much lower melting point. It’s one of the reasons they’re using steel.

We’ve seen much larger holes than that in previous tests. Some of the control fins burned completely through.

[GuB-42]

For some of the tests, they removed a few tiles before launch, presumably to test that. Starship did fine.

[fooblaster]

coming back in one piece, and being good enough to use for 5 more missions are two very different things. For example, all existing reentry vehicles come back "fine" but they need to be completely remade to go up again.

[ceejayoz]

I remember this being the same argument used against the Falcon 9 when it first stuck its landings.

"Oh, they'll need to do it 10x to be profitable!"

Now they do, as a matter of course.

[fooblaster]

Just because you defeat popular consensus of what is possible in one place doesn't mean you can continue to do it again and again. This stuff is hard.

[hdgvhicv]

Yes reusing falcon 9 was hard too.

Being a cynical naysay isn’t hard.

[aeternum]

They already demonstrated that entire tiles can be removed without wrecking the spacecraft.

The quarter thing may have been true for the space shuttle, that doesn't make it true in general.

[peebee67]

Deliberately testing its survivability with that failure mode over different parts of the vehicle has been one of the major foci throughout the entire test campaign, and it has proven remarkably resilient. That generalisation pretty much does not hold for starship.

[laughing_man]

I doubt that. It's made of stainless steel. If it gets home safely they can patch it.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Weren't the tiles one of the worst obstacles to quick turnaround times for the shuttle? It was something like 18 months before one could be launched again, and that's if they were in a hurry.

[fastball]

SpaceX has been specifically engineering both the tiles themselves (e.g. manufacturing) and the way that are used on the ship to be much more rapidly repairable than the Shuttle.

[laughing_man]

By the end they could turn a shuttle around in ten weeks.