White streaks ran across the belly of Starship in SpaceX’s drone footage of the vehicle after it came down in the Indian Ocean. Each one seemed to start at the seam between two ceramic tiles. That detail, spotted by outside experts after Flight 13 on Friday, July 24, 2026, is why a launch that otherwise went well has reopened an old argument about heat shields, Ars Technica reported on July 27.
The flight itself went to plan. Starship lifted off, reentered, made a controlled descent and landed in the water. Only a few of its roughly 18,000 tiles were lost. SpaceX could send the vehicle into orbit on its next flight, begin delivering satellites and try to catch it with the launch tower on return.
Cracks and streaks
The footage also showed cracked tiles and broken edges. The streaks suggest hot gas got into the gaps between tiles. A shield in that state would need a fair amount of inspection and repair before another launch, according to the analysis Ars described. And that is the sticking point. SpaceX wants “full” reuse of booster and upper stage, and “rapid” reuse, meaning a turnaround of days or weeks rather than months.
“Starship’s current thermal protection system is a dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability,” said Dan Rasky, a former NASA engineer who spent nearly four decades studying heat shield materials at NASA Ames Research Center. He co-invented PICA, the material on Crew Dragon’s heat shield. Former NASA astronaut Charles Camarda and Charles Miller, who headed the NASA transition team for the Trump-Vance White House, joined him on the analysis.
The shuttle’s old problem
NASA ran into the same wall with the Space Shuttle. Its lightweight ceramic tiles protected an aluminum structure and worked fairly well, but every tile needed a check after each flight, so turning an orbiter around stayed slow and expensive.
Starship has an edge. Its steel structure can take temperatures up to 800 degrees Celsius where tiles fail, so some burn-through is probably acceptable. The experts called SpaceX’s design a good “incremental” step beyond the shuttle but built on the same basic idea. It will probably do for a next-generation Starlink constellation. They doubt it can support the several hundred to thousands of low-cost launches a year that Moon and Mars settlements, orbital data centers or space-based solar power would need.
SpaceX knows it. Elon Musk has called the reusable heat shield “the biggest problem that remains” for Starship. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel in February, he said: “If you want to be able to land it, refill propellant, and fly again, you can’t do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing.” The company has put money into new tile formulations and standardized shapes, and has been testing approaches during the flight campaign.
Where NASA stands
The experts pointed to the agency as a possible source of help. By their account, NASA has made no substantial investment in thermal protection for vehicles returning from low-Earth orbit, at Mach 25, for three decades. Starship’s technology traces back to the shuttle, the National Aerospace Plane and X-33 programs, and nobody today is seriously funding new materials for orbital reentry.
Miller interviewed senior NASA officials for the transition team in late 2024 and was told nothing sat in the basic research pipeline, though current and former researchers saw promising ideas. The team recommended a new NASA initiative for Mach 25 thermal protection research, development and demonstrations. That has not happened.
