Next week SpaceX will launch 20 satellites into space, and 6 of them will immediately turn around and photograph the rocket that carried them. The cargo is the absolute witness here. And the real reason is the one problem that has never bent to engineering.
Everything else about a “reusable rocket” has been solved already. Engines relight. Boosters land. The last wall is the heat shield, a skin of ceramic tiles that stands between 100 tons of steel and the plasma of reentry. However it has no backup.
A rocket cannot see its own belly, and no camera on Earth can watch a ship's underside while it is burning through the atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound.
So Musk and his team at SpaceX turned its own payload into an eyewitness. Six of the Starlink satellites carry cameras aimed back at the ship, to photograph the tiles and beam the images down. Stranger still, engineers painted several tiles white, staging a fake wound, faking missing tiles to see whether the fleet can spot the damage.
A rocket that inspects itself using the satellites it just released. 🤔
The purpose is buried in one particular phrase in SpaceX's own announcement: they are testing heat shield readiness for return to launch site. Right now Starship dies at sea, splashing down in an ocean where a failure kills nothing. The entire future depends on flying it back to Texas and catching it over land, over roads, over people.
And guess what, you only earn that right if you can prove, before reentry, that not one tile is missing.
NASA learned this the hardest way possible back then.
In 2003 Columbia came apart over Texas because a piece of foam had punched a hole in its heat shield, and no one could see the wound while there was still time.
23 years later, a rocket is being taught to check its own skin, by the cargo it carries. Smart idea!!
The piece works out why the last wall in spaceflight is not fire, but the tiles that hold it back.
SpaceX says over 90% of its future market is AI, not space. @DMaguireARK, ACA breaks down what that means: orbital data centers, a potential $28.5 trillion Total Addressable Market (TAM), and why Starship is the only vehicle that can get there.
@tugce190333 호르몬적으로 여성들이 겪는 어려움이 있고 남성들 엮시 탈모나 여성보다 짧은 수명, 더 이른 죽음에 고생하고 있지.그런데 생리,임신,폐경같은 자연적인 섭리로 고생하는것보다 아름아움을 유지하기 위한 다이어트, 가꾸는걸 더 고생하지 않아? 그게 더 고생스러운것 같은데 그걸 말안하지?