Watching that actually gave me a little shiver of fear for the people picking up the tiles.
Always by the edges. If you pick them up by the faces, you may lose your fingerprints. The faces are still very, very hot.
...amazing technology.
They make good frisbees too. The material has about the same density as expanded polystyrene. It's just weighty enough to throw, but not so dense that it hurts when one hits you. Don't ask.
The highest temperature I deal with is 220 degrees, cooking pizzas in the oven. Obviously no problems putting my hands in the air there, but I'm very careful to not touch anything.
The commercial pizza ovens I used were set to 370 C and could cook a full-sized pizza in 5-7 minutes. It's a conveyor oven so you don't have to reach inside. But you still use gloves and pliers to handle the products. Now I want to put a shuttle tile in one and see what happens.
But, according to Heiwa, no use for protecting the Shuttle.
Right, according to him nothing works unless he can personally figure out how.
And anyway, he couldn't work out how they stuck them on...
More proof that he doesn't work in any sort of engineering science or industry. One thing you learn working in aerospace, or indeed in any scientific or industrial field, is that you get to use technologies and products whose capability far exceeds anything you find in the consumer world. For safety reasons the people who handle and use them often have to be trained and certified, so they can't be sold directly to the public. Industrial adhesives are a good example. We have some epoxies that produce harmful fumes, are tremendously toxic until the cure, and will practically stick a car to the side of a building. And we have some pressure-sensitive adhesives that will literally tear your skin if you accidentally put your finger on them. Obviously for liability purposes these products are used by or sold to the general public, but they exist in the inventory of materials we can bring to bear.
Shuttle tile stickum is serious stuff. I wonder what Anders would say if he found out the wing spars on commercial airliners are glue-laminated aluminum. But you can see why he's so desperate to be seen as some kind of engineer. If Joe Random Layman can't figure out how something is done in the space program, it's because it's, well, the space program. But if he argues, "I can't see how this could have been done, and I'm a very smart engineer with lots of expertise," then the argument almost becomes convincing. That's why he bristles when people tell him he doesn't know what he's talking about.
