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Why small hard to intall hexogonal tiles?

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 20:54:46 2021 No.13959583 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>13959619 >>13959621 >>13959686 >>13959723 >>13959737 >>13959780

Why not use larger sections ?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:03:50 No.13959619 Report

Quoted By: >>13959640

>>13959583
I still doubt they're going to be able to launch Starship into orbit without having the tanks crushed from their own weight.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:04:22 No.13959621 Report

Quoted By: >>13959644

>>13959583
Go home 1970s, you're drunk.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:09:47 No.13959640 Report

Quoted By:

>>13959619

Its going to be beautiful once it works.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:12:33 No.13959644 Report

Quoted By:

>>13959621

Tiles take a lot of time to put on. Why not larger curved sections ?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:24:15 No.13959686 Report

Quoted By: >>13959702

>>13959583
The real reason why is because Those tiles are expensive, probably about $1,000 each.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-feb-06-sci-tiles6-story.html

Though I don't know if SpaceX has released how expensive they are now. I think NASA got the price down to about $1,000/tile when the space shuttle program was going on.

The tiles are "small" so SpaceX only has to replace the ones that get damaged. The rest of them are reused as much as possible to save on costs.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:28:48 No.13959702 Report

Quoted By: >>13959722

>>13959686

Does the labor and time it takes to replace them not eat up the cost savings.

It seem to me that it took weeks and weeks to put them on and each one can be installed wrongly.

Large sections can be put in place with far fewer opportunities for human install error.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:36:46 No.13959722 Report

Quoted By: >>13959733

>>13959702

https://spaceexplored.com/2021/09/27/starship-20-loses-thermal-protection-tiles/

That I am not sure of. It might be more about safety than cost-savings. If you have fewer large tiles, if one of them fails then it could cause much bigger issues during re-entry. Whereas if one small tile fails, it has less of an impact.

https://www.airspacemag.com/how-things-work/shuttle-tiles-12580671/

Compared to NASA --where every tile was custom-- SpaceX is trying to use as many hexagonal tiles as possible so they don't have to keep making custom tiles. I'm sure that alone helped them save time/costs.

Some things you just can't make cheaper due to the physics/material-science involved.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:36:53 No.13959723 Report

Quoted By:

>>13959583
Various reasons.

Ease of manufacturing, smaller tiles requires smaller tooling, requiring cheaper tooling, faster to manufacture, easier to verify structural integrity, easier to attach by hands, easier to angle around the curves, cheaper, etc

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:40:14 No.13959733 Report

Quoted By:

>>13959722

thanks !

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:41:05 No.13959737 Report

Quoted By:

>>13959583
SpaceX works in mysterious ways, do not question it.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Dec 2021 21:52:28 No.13959780 Report

Quoted By:

>>13959583
My guess would be that larger tiles would break easily if the vehicle bends or stretch or whatever during reentry

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