A new expert analysis has questioned the viability of the SpaceX Starship program, particularly its ability to rapidly reset for full reuse. The culprit—Starship’s heat shielding—has long been known to be a challenge for SpaceX.
When a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere, it uses drag against the increasingly thick gas to do most of its deceleration, usually from dozens of times the speed of sound.
Reentry creates the classic fireball associated with spaceships, satellites, and meteors descending toward Earth, generating a great deal of heat and quickly burning away most materials that could be used to build a spaceship.
NASA’s classic answer has been to plate spacecraft slated for reentry with small, specialized ceramic tiles that can withstand extreme temperatures and be cut and arranged to cover any surface shape.
These tiles are still stressed by the heat of reentry, and NASA has had to painstakingly inspect thousands upon thousands of tiles for every launch of a retrievable vehicle.
SpaceX’s Starship program was supposed to change this, with its promise to dramatically reduce the cost of launching to orbit, largely deriving from Elon Musk’s claims that the Starship will be able to reset for successive launches in a matter of weeks, or eventually even days.
But experts, including three former NASA officials, say that current technologies cannot realistically be advanced far enough to make Starship’s affordability promises a reality, particularly due to the heat shielding issue.
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Dan Rasky, a former NASA engineer who studied heat shield materials for nearly four decades at NASA Ames Research Center, said that Starship’s current thermal protection system is a dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability.
Other analysts, including Charles Miller and Charles Camarda, two former NASA employees, have also expressed concerns about the heat shield, with Miller calling out what he characterized as NASA’s downplaying of the dangers to astronauts in space missions.
This is not the first time heat shielding has become an issue, with NASA’s Orion spacecraft experiencing damage to its heat shield just a couple of years ago, prompting an extensive search for the cause of the partial failure.
Despite substantial research, no truly new idea is even close to ready for uses like those SpaceX has in mind for its Starships, and the current solutions have improved only slightly over the past several decades.
They are concerned that Elon Musk could stick with the tiles that already work while still pushing for re-use schedules that make proper tile inspections impossible.
Experts quoted in the report have a long-standing concern with NASA over the lack of investment in heat shield development, and their ultimate recommendation is that NASA invest more in it.
It is essential for NASA to invest in heat shield development to ensure the safety of astronauts in space missions.
