A lot of people knew the Space Shuttle had ceramic tiles to protect its nose from reentry heat. That’s mostly because the tiles fell off a lot and each one was a unique shape, so it got a lot of ...

helping avoid issues of the tiles falling off, which happened early in the Space Shuttle Program. When workers first tried to ferry Shuttle Columbia to the Kennedy Space Center in 1979 on the back ...

A single shuttle tile can cost up to $1,000 to make. Prior to the closure of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, NASA began ...