a largely successful Flight 10 mission Aug. 26<\/a>.<\/p>\nMusk confirmed there is one remaining launch of version 2 of Starship, planned for later this year, before switching to version 3. He didn\u2019t offer an estimate of when the first version 3 launch would take place.<\/p>\n
At the American Astronautical Society\u2019s Glenn Space Technology Symposium Sept. 8, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said that final version 2 launch will, like the previous flights, be a suborbital mission. \u201cWe\u2019re going to try and understand how the ship flies,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said he expected the first launch of Starship version 3 would also be suborbital. \u201cIf that\u2019s successful, then we\u2019ll probably go orbital after that with the next v3.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thermal protection system testing<\/p>\n
One of the key challenges for Starship is developing a thermal protection system for the upper stage that can survive the rigors of reentry but does not require significant maintenance between flights.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor full reusability of the ship, there\u2019s still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield. No one has ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield,\u201d Musk said, citing the extensive work required on the space shuttle\u2019s heat shield between flights.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really are looking at fundamental physics here,\u201d he said, \u201ctrying to figure out how do we make something that can withstand the heat, is very light, doesn\u2019t transmit the heat to the primary structure, and the tiles stay on and don\u2019t crack.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Flight 10, SpaceX tested some alternative tile technologies. That contributed to the odd discoloration of the vehicle after reentry, with part of the nose section white while much of the body was rust-colored.<\/p>\n
Gerstenmaier said that on Flight 10, SpaceX installed three metallic tiles to test their performance compared to the ceramic tiles used elsewhere on the ship. \u201cThey would be simpler to manufacture and more durable than the ceramic tiles,\u201d he said. \u201cTurns out they\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n
The metallic tiles \u201cdidn\u2019t do so good,\u201d he said, oxidizing in the upper atmosphere during reentry.<\/p>\n
The white material in the nose, he said, was from an ablative material below the tiles that SpaceX also uses on its Dragon spacecraft. \u201cWhat that\u2019s showing us is that we\u2019re having heat essentially get into that region between the tiles, go underneath the tiles, and this ablative structure is then ablating underneath. So again, we learned that we need to seal the tiles.\u201d<\/p>\n
One technique that shows promise, he said, is a material he called \u201ccrunch wrap\u201d that he compared to wrapping paper that goes around each tile when it is installed on the vehicle. Tiles on the ship that used the crunch wrap had less of the white ablative material than those in other parts of the vehicle that did not use it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we found was that this crunch wrap technique is allowing us to essentially seal between the tiles without putting a gap filler in between the tiles,\u201d Gerstenmaier said. For the next flight, SpaceX plans to use crunch wrap for tiles throughout the vehicle \u201cand see if we can get better sealing and better tile performance moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
That next flight, he added, will do less experimentation with thermal tiles than on Flight 10. \u201cWe\u2019ll probably cut back a little bit. We\u2019re going to try to go more toward the configuration we want to fly next year.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk says he is confident that Starship can start delivering 100 tons…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[18,1647,19,17,133,3977,451,2730],"class_list":{"0":"post-55230","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-elon-musk","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-sn","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-starship"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}