The Microscopic Trick That Makes Heat Shielding Tiles Work

All @Scott Manley content is great, but these explanations of technical details of space flight are by far the best.

Excellent explanation Scott on how the "glass" tiles TPS works. Enough tech info to satisfy a nerd, but clear enough for a lay person to catch your drift.

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you for the top notch content, as always🙏

I watched that video about the heat tile comparison. I didn't realize he took down the video though.

Machining glass fibers, the most spicy of all the fibers!

You're one of my favorite teachers

The shuttle was really cool.

4:03 that's a bigass microscope image lmao

I believe SpaceX focuses on possibility of "rapidly" attaching all tiles just before flight, that way the tiles can be factory prepared and kept in protective atmosphere like a consumable material.

Another banger, sir

good ol' asbestos is the secret 😂

so in reality i dont mess up the settings for my 3D printer, i just accidentally built a TPS

ITAR is no joke. Glad you checked. Wonder if a plumber's soldering blanket could help? ~2,300 degrees and cheaper than dirt. 17cents a square inch retail.

The 'wet-tile-problem' can easily be solved by avoiding the tiles getting wet in the first place. So you put your whole vehicle in a closed space, that you only open for launching on a sunny day. And you only let the vehicle return in the earthly atmosphere again on a sunny day. I think in the long run, the heat-resisting coating will eventually be continuously applied to the whole exposed area of the vehicle, doing away with tiles coming loose issue. Lastly, I think the Shuttle/Buran/Dreamchaser/spaceplane concept is much superior to the Starship concept. It not only looks way more cooler and intuitive, it is much more versatile, as it can land on virtually any airport in the world, while Starship requires awkward capturing structures where lots of things can go wrong.

Excellent explanation. Thank you.

Thanks for the video

Do you know anything about the heatshield that the X-33 was going to use? I found a picture from the air and space museum, presumably the back side of the tile (can find it searching for this -> NASM-A20060281000_PS03). It was developed by BF Goodrich (tire company?) and used Inconel. I'm not aware of that design finding its way onto any other vehicle.

Thank you,Scott!

in the article there was something about having high privileges on the system that may lead to planting malicious kernel, are those systems vulnerable to evil maid attack too ?

So the space shuttle waterproofing was all about the spaces between the tiles? I'll take a closer look on those at the next starship launch then :D