▲ | floating-io 2 days ago | |||||||
Remains to be seen. That's what they want, but it's never been done before. (edit: clarity: they do NOT want to replace them after each flight.) They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two). I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before launching again. | ||||||||
▲ | ericcumbee 2 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||
Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut down the time to replace a single tile down to minutes instead of the hours it took with the shuttle. The Tiles are also alot more standardized so they can be more mass produced than shuttle tiles. | ||||||||
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