It is 10:40pm at Starbase and workers are still cutting into the water tanks.
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Someone found a TPMS tile from S25 on the beach. Based on how easily he is holding it up with one hand the tiles must be pretty light.
I'm surprised to see that they're hollow. I guess they're actually flat, and have a surface going back from the face (the 'sides') because the fasteners push that flat face out from the stainless surface. I wonder if the dominant reason is thermal or aerodynamic. You certainly wouldn't want a Mach 1 airstream getting behind a bunch of flat tiles.
Also interesting they seem to have metal inserts for the attachment pins....and was hard to see in the video, but the "slots" in the inserts didn't look to be obviously deformed. Given that the tile is intact, but obviously fell off, I assume the pins are just not staying seated in the inserts.
It wouldn't SEEM that difficult to make it practically impossible for the pin head to reverse out of a slot like that.,... heck zip ties are practically impossible to get undone... but clearly the vibration/stresses of a rocket in flight is no joke...
It wouldn't SEEM that difficult to make it practically impossible for the pin head to reverse out of a slot like that.,... heck zip ties are practically impossible to get undone... but clearly the vibration/stresses of a rocket in flight is no joke...
Yeah, it showed us pretty much everything we could want to know about the tiles from a mechanical standpoint - except how they're removed.
The stresses during an explosion are kinda high too, but it's really odd that the tile is essentially pristine. My recollection is that they're very brittle (ceramic). I recall one guy removing tiles by smashing them with a hammer. I wonder if the darned thing just fell off early because it was improperly mounted.
How does he know it's from Starship 25? Because he's on a Caribbean beach? If it's Texas, then it could be from any vehicle that went over the Gulf.
There are only two ships it could be from, and it looks too clean for nearly 9 months at sea.
Why not a booster? Also, it may have been on the beach for 8 months. I have no idea where he was or how often people are in that area.
I'm quickly approaching the point where I just can't post here anymore.
Especially when the vehicle does a RUD, as @JB47394 noted.
I suspect a lot of tiles popped off when S25 went boom, and they are still floating out in the Gulf.
But we've seen lots of tiles falling off during launch/flight... not just when something goes Kablooey!
If there was a RUD, I'd expect a bunch of tiles, or tile fragments, to show up on the same stretch of beach. Right? This one must have fallen off. Unless that guy did find a bunch of tile fragments, had finally found his trophy and didn't bother to mention fragments.
Shuttle tiles varied from 0.14 to 0.35 g/cm3. Water is 1 g/cm3. Cork is 0.235 g/cm3. So they literally float like corks. I assume the SpaceX tiles aren't much different.
Yes, I’m sure there were many fractured tiles, but it also seems possible that as the ship tanks expanded during the explosion some tiles just popped off intact. And as you noted, the guy who made that video may have found many tile pieces and didn’t mention them, he wanted the video to focus on his “trophy”.
Buckminster
Well-Known Member
And to add: Since I believe the mishap report analysis that SpaceX submits to the FAA for the launch license is public, I hope we'll get some insight as to the issues that caused both the Booster and Starship to explode... will be interesting to see if the conjecture on the Booster having deceleration and/or fuel slosh issues are right...
Very odd that SpaceX has been completely silent on this... makes me wonder if they themselves are in the dark? Especially the Starship RUD.
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