SpaceX Just Conquered Orbit. Now It’s Being Beaten by a Ceramic Tile.
SpaceX’s Starship is a marvel of modern engineering, but its entire rapid-reuse business model is threatened by an unglamorous reality: the ceramic heat shield. While the rocket survives reentry, the fragile tiles require weeks of labor-intensive inspection and replacement, turning a spectacular flight success into an operational nightmare that could ground the program’s economics.