SCIFLI Starship Reentry Observation (SSRO-ACO)

SpaceX is partnering with NASA Langley’s Scientifically Calibrated In-Flight Imagery (SCIFLI) team to obtain calibrated temperature imagery of the the orbital reentry of the SpaceX Starship thermal protection system (TPS) during hypersonic reentry over the Pacific Ocean. The collected imagery will be correlated with onboard sensors to quantify aerothermal performance and help validate SpaceX's modeling and developmental testing efforts. Validated engineering tools will help inform the design of Starship's TPS as SpaceX seeks to complete a rapidly reusable human-rated design.  The SCIFLI team will select the most appropriate capabilities from a suite of air-, sea- and land-based imagery assets. Advancing the state-of-the-art thermal protection system design through this imagery and data correlation effort will result in future aerospace vehicles that maximize re-use of the vehicle TPS without significant rework or maintenance, reducing overall costs. The flight measurements will permit a more precise understanding of Starship's TPS step and gap tolerances and will provide insight into the timing and impact of boundary layer transition at high Mach number.  This effort is in support of the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s “Go” and “Land” strategic thrusts. The data from the thermal protection system sensors on Starship will be shared with NASA, to be applied to  future development efforts for reentry vehicles. Design tools validated with flight data will also enable a more precise assessment of robotic spacecraft thermal performance margins during planetary atmospheric entry. SpaceX will launch Starship from Boca Chica, TX, and the reentry observation will occur over the South Indian Ocean. Boundary layer transition may occur earlier than predicted by computational tools (as observed on NASA’s Space Shuttle Orbiter during its return to Earth), which would exacerbate heating during entry.

​The primary benefit of this task will be to obtain high spatial resolution surface temperature measurements of the SpaxeX  Starship heatshield during its hypersonic reentry. The remote measurements will be obtained non-intrusively without impacting vehicle size, weight, and power requirements and thus, have no impacts on vehicle's launch schedule. The non-invasive measurements on an integrated vehicle in an actual hypersonic flight environment will increase overall mission capability via more accurate modeling/design tools and provide a source of comparison for vehicle in-situ thermocouple performance. ​As Starship production and launch operations are refined over the first few years of operation, SpaceX plans to further reduce the cost of access to space by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude in terms of dollars per kilogram. Rapid reusability of the entire Starship launch system—including its heatshield technology—is critical for achieving this reduction. Thus, this opportunity to improve the Starship TPS, in partnership with NASA, will potentially allow SpaceX to produce the first-ever fully reusable orbital launch and entry vehicle.​

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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