SpaceX Starship Has A Panel Gap Problem On Its Heat Shield

The latest SpaceX Starship is quietly bobbing in the middle of the Indian Ocean. That may not seem like where a space rocket wants to be, but it actually represents a successful splashdown for the upper stage of the newest Version 3 model. It also landed on-target and may be recovered by boats and dragged back to shore. But there are problems lurking right there on the hull. It seems that, just like CEO Elon Musk's other company Tesla, SpaceX is suffering from a panel gap issue. Specifically, the heat shield shows clear white streaks, indicating that superheated air got between the heat shield tiles during atmospheric reentry. And that's not even the worst of the issues. Starship V3 has a long way to go before its ready to land astronauts on the Moon.

To be clear, the heat shield worked, in the sense that the Starship's upper stage made it back to Earth in one piece. Even the heat shield itself is in one piece, er, mostly. Of its 18,000 tiles, only a small handful fell off. But it didn't ace this test: According to a joint post by current and former space professionals, "Many dozens to hundreds of tiles were cracked, chipped, and substantially damaged." Combined with the white-streak indication of panel gaps, that brings the heat shield's status into serious question. Maybe it's fine! Then again, maybe it isn't, in which case it would need to be replaced with a brand-new one. In either case, the only way to know would be to spend weeks or months examining the shield.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the exact same procedure that the space shuttle had to go through during its life cycle, as Ars Technica notes. This is part of what prevented the shuttle from flying as frequently as airplanes, one of the original hopes of that project. SpaceX has the same hope for Starship, and in fact, it's insanely high (though falling) valuation depends on it. To be worth trillions of dollars, SpaceX needs to deliver on a number of promises, including vast satellite constellations, AI data centers in space, and frequent trips to the Moon for both personnel and cargo. Only Starship, not the company's reliable workhorse Falcon 9, can do all that. It needs to do all that a lot, though, meaning frequent flights. That's not possible if the heat shield has to be carefully examined every single time.

In fairness, that's a long-term problem. The current heat shield system will be sufficient to test Starship, which is very much still in its prototyping phase. It will probably be enough to start launching the new Starlink V3 satellites, which can only fit on Starship, not Falcon 9. (SpaceX really bet the farm on Starship.) So it won't be for many more years until Starship will need a better heat shield.

The trouble, though, is that this is also a decades-old problem. Starship's shield uses the same basic technology as the space shuttle did. After NASA built that tech, it canceled all future R&D due to, what else, budget cuts. Sure would be nice if NASA got some more funding instead of, say, constantly being threatened with even more cuts (although Congress is trying to help). Government-funded basic research like this supports the entire space sector and, by extension, the whole country. Without it, heat shield technology has remained stagnant. SpaceX is aware of the issue and is doing its own R&D, but there's no promise of when or if that might deliver results. Even if it does, it will be proprietary, which is great for SpaceX and no one else.

So the heat shield's got some issues to work out, but what about the rest of the new Starship V3 rocket? It's only flown twice so far, and the results have been mixed. In both cases, the upper stage reached its target area. But also in both cases, the first stage booster didn't recover sufficient control and crashed into the ocean. Yes, the booster was always intended to go into the ocean for these test flights, but these were crashes, not controlled descents.

The main gremlins here are the upgraded Raptor engines, which are also on their third version (everything is, apparently). They are just not working reliably. On their first flight on May 22, engine failures occurred on both the booster and the upper stage; on the second, engine failures actually scrubbed the original launch attempt on July 16 and then cropped up again during the booster's descent on July 24. Rockets are hard and this is why prototyping is important, so this isn't a crisis for SpaceX, but it is a real problem. Job number one right now is getting those Raptor engines to be as reliable as Falcon 9's engines.

It should be mentioned that the July 24 flight also successfully deployed the very first Starlink V3 satellites. Because of this, SpaceX currently has zero of them active. That's because, as you well know, satellites need to be in orbit. Starship has still never flown there. This suborbital flight tested the machinery for deployment, but as expected, the satellites just immediately burned up in atmosphere. Again, to get to orbit, you really need those engines to work.