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A comment on Orbital Test Launch of Starship in ~4 hours. Parent comment

Re:Orbital Test Launch of Starship in ~4 hours by _kst_ on Monday April 17, 2023 @12:53PM (#35603395)
Without a heat shield, Starship wouldn't be able to bring a crew back from orbit (or higher), regardless of reuse.

Starship HLS, the planned lunar landing version, probably won't need a heat shield, but they'll definitely need shielding on any version meant to bring a crew back to Earth. They're just not bothering with heat shielding for tests that don't need it.

(I don't know what kind of shielding the Starship that was supposed to launch today has.)

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Re:Orbital Test Launch of Starship in ~4 hours by cubefox on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @02:34PM (#35617987)
Starship launching and landing humans on Earth seems quite far away, if it happens at all. Of course they need the heat shield until then, but the much more immediate benefit of the heat shield comes from reducing cost of cargo flights by allowing for reusability of the upper stage. For ordinary non-human payloads, mainly satellites.
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