SpaceX Developing Tools To Remove Heat Shield Tiles On Starship Rather Than Manually Breaking Them Away, Says CEO Elon Musk

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday said that the company is working on making it easier to remove the heat shield tiles on its ambitious Starship launch vehicle.

What Happened: “We're working on simple tooling to make this fast and repeatable,” Musk said in response to a user who expressed surprise that the removal of the tile still requires workers to manually exert pressure, thereby breaking it.

The removal mechanism was revealed in footage by X account RGV Aerial Photography whose lead photographer Irma Atilano has been documenting Starbase for about 6 years.

The video shared by the photographer shows a worker putting physical effort into removing one heatshield tile, subsequently breaking it.

The Starship has multiple hexagonal heat-shield tiles designed to protect against the extreme heat of reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. However, during its last test flight in June where the company managed to splash Starship spacecraft down in the Indian Ocean, the vehicle lost many of its tiles during reentry.

Why It Matters: SpaceX is expected to have at least six flights of the Starship this year, as per CEO Elon Musk‘s latest estimate from March.

NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to land humans back on the moon. The last crewed lunar mission occurred in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is aiming to land humans on Mars aboard the launch vehicle which stands 121 meters tall and weighs about 5,000 tonnes.

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Photo courtesy: SpaceX