I got the names backwards, yes, and glad someone took my admittedly snarky bait about the orange.

As far as "inelegance", this is not sci-fi; a pretty environment with handsome solutions. Actually, "tiles" are a very clever one to the problem of heat dispersion and resistance, and not new by any means starting with the firebrick in ovens and fireboxes.

I seem to remember one of Apollo (or more than one) had the problem of those much prettier monolithic heat shields delaminating from expansion exceeding the yield of the attachment, that on a much smaller area and a simple shape without compound and reverse curves.

That disc shape makes for a much simpler problem to solve, impossible with the shape to contend with on the shuttle. So be it; the solution was classically clever: take a lesson from the past as a starting point, use it only as an inspiration from which to explore a possible solution to a truly difficult thermo problem that is most certainly not theoretical but never successfully done before, in response to a known design weakness of Apollo made fatally flawed in the new design conditions imposed by the shuttle. Who cares if it isn't pretty?

The space-to-atmosphere transition is but one of the cases in this game where thermodynamic conditions barely overlap the extreme limits of materials as we know them. I'm amazed (actually not) at how cavalierly people dismiss these things as schoolboy errors in a somehow a "normal"environment, be it Hubble's initial focus issues, the breakup of the shuttle, whatever.

Sci fi makes this sound so easy and normal and trivial, yet when one actually designs to the environmental extremes encountered outside Earths atmosphere, one realises the hostility one is pushing the limits of practical engineering (as we currently know it) to counter. I'm actually impressed there has been so much success for so few failures. I'm afraid the mainstream are so used to the (unremarked) successes they fail to realise we are way way beyond elegance here.