There are thousands of individual tiles. If one falls off or something like that does everything burn up? thanks and how did the heat shield not work for the shuttle in 2003? it might have been in 2001 i have to ask my science teacher
The space shuttle was called discovery. Basically, if a tile falls off, then the glue underneath the tiles is exposed. This glue is vulnerable to the heat due to re-entry and melts, causing all the tiles to fall off and destroying the shuttle.
Depends on where that tile falls off or is otherwise compromised. The black tiles take the most heat and would certainly be the ones to be concerned about. The white tiles less are used where the heat produced by the reentry process is less, so a missing tile there, would pose less of a problem.
It took a very large gap in the tiles in order to cause the Columbia disaster. Every flight loses a few tiles, however. The shock wave produced by the surrounding tiles keeps the heat out of the crater of one or two tiles that go lose and fall out during reentry.
The Columbia disaster happened because during launch some insulation came off the external tank and hit the leading edge of the wing, right between the two tiles and damaged the seal. During the re-entry, the hot gases from the re-entry friction got behind the tile and melted the wing structure. A few tiles fall off during flight, but it is not a big problem, less so than during the early years of shuttle operations. If you look at the shuttles, some tiles appear fresher then others.
It depends on where the tile is, and when it comes off. In the case of the Columbia accident in 2003, it actually wasn't the tiles--it was one of the carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the wing that got hit by a briefcase-sized hunk of insulation off the external tank, and got a hole blown in it. During reentry, the hole allowed hot gasses to enter the structure of the left wing. The heat caused the aluminum used in making the wing to weaken and fail. There are two kinds of tiles used, in addition to the carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the wing and the nose. The black tiles that you see on the underside and coming up the side of the fuselage are for areas of greater heating, while the white tiles protect areas where there is less heating. Losing a tile has two possible problems. If the tile is directly over a critical area (say a hydraulic line), you may get burn through and cause the line or whatever to fail. Popping off a tile also changes the way that air flows around the shuttle. It's possible that the turbulence from one missing tile can cause others to come off in what is called the zipper effect. The more tiles you lose, the greater the chance that you're going to lose a critical tile. Also, if you lose enough of them, it's possible that the shuttle might become aerodynamically unstable, and impossible to control. I don't recall any of the flights having a problem with burn through even though tiles have been lost or damaged on just about every flight
