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Without a heat shield, Starship wouldn't be able to bring a crew back from orbit (or higher), regardless of reuse. Starship HLS, the planned lunar landing vers
by _kst_ 3y ago
Without a heat shield, Starship wouldn't be able to bring a crew back from orbit (or higher), regardless of reuse.
Starship HLS, the planned lunar landing version, probably won't need a heat shield, but they'll definitely need shielding on any version meant to bring a crew back to Earth. They're just not bothering with heat shielding for tests that don't need it.
(I don't know what kind of shielding the Starship that was supposed to launch today has.)
- cubefox 3y agoStarship launching and landing humans on Earth seems quite far away, if it happens at all. Of course they need the heat shield until then, but the much more immediate benefit of the heat shield comes from reducing cost of cargo flights by allowing for reusability of the upper stage. For ordinary non-human payloads, mainly satellites.