SpaceX STARSHIP Flight 12 Complete - 22 May 2026 - World's Biggest Rocket 🚀

Añadido: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Hello once again, star people, and welcome back to Starbase Texas. It's currently 5:01 p.m. Central time, and we are just 38, excuse me, 28 1/2 minutes away from the first flight of SpaceX's next generation vehicle, Starship version 3. Yesterday's launch attempt was scrubbed due to a hydraulic pin on the pad tower that wouldn't retract. But good news, the teams were able to resolve that issue and we're proceeding ahead with attempt number two and blue skies to boot. I'm Kate Ty, senior manager of quality systems engineering.

[00:00:36]And I'm Jake Burkowitz, a lead propulsion engineer. And today we're coming to you live once again from just outside the production floor at Staractory where the team's preparing for Starship's 12th test flight. Yeah, yesterday was certainly a nailbiter as we recycled to the T42nd uh excuse me, T-minus 42nd hold a couple of times. And while we unfortunately weren't able to lift off, keep in mind that this is the first flight of a completely redesigned vehicle. So, we actually learned a lot in what became a wet dress rehearsal yesterday.

[00:01:10]>> Yeah, that's right. And Starship version 3 has undergone significant upgrades, taking everything we've learned from the previous 11 flights to make a vehicle capable of full and rapid reusability.

[00:01:22]>> We're debuting a new launchpad, new booster, new ship, and new engines, just to name a few.

[00:01:28]>> Yeah, that's right. And as a member of the Raptor team, I can tell you we're all super excited to finally see the newest generation of Raptor engines, also V3, take flight today. I love that view looking up under the super heavy.

[00:01:40]Now, Raptor and Starship version 3 are designed to enable us to send payloads and eventually people all the way to the moon and Mars. Yeah. And in the meantime, we're planning to put Starship to work on future flights by launching bigger and more powerful Starlink version 3 satellites, which aim to substantially increase capacity in orbit, strengthen the network, and deliver an improved experience for customers. Now turning our attention back to today. Our primary objective for flight 12 is to put these new redesigns all together in a real live flight environment. From the outside, a lot might look familiar on Starship, but beneath the surface, it's all new. As we've said before, Starship is still a developmental program. What we're doing today is a test. We launch to learn and we test like we fly.

[00:02:29]>> Yeah. Again, it's really the data we're expecting to get back from today's flight that will bring us closer to making Starship operational and unlocking the next generation of our future in space. So, no matter the outcome of today's test flight, excitement is guaranteed.

[00:02:45]>> Now, let's head a couple floors upstairs where Dan Huitt is just outside our launch control center. How's it going up there today, Dan?

[00:02:52]>> It's going great, Kate. Everybody, welcome back for round two. I'm Dan Hwitt with SpaceX Communications. We're looking good for a launch today. Do want to do a quick summary though of what we saw yesterday, how we got back to launch. It's a really good example of all of the different moving parts that have to work together to get a rocket off the pad. About halfway up that tower, you see an arm that holds all of the propellant connections into the ship. It's also set up so it kind of pushes against the ship to help make sure that we have a really good connection and it stays attached when we unlatch that quick disconnect. There's a pin in the arm near where that attaches to the tower that has to be removed before the arm can swing away for launch. It's important to remember there's a lot of benefit to not release the arm too early or too late and a lot of hardware that has to work in concert in very very short time frames. We started to unpin it. Releasing that tension caused some motion in the arm that triggered a hold and that put the pin back in. Then that ended up that got us into a bit of a tugof-war between systems on the tower that rely on hydraulic pressure to work. really the arm trying to keep its pressure on the ship and trying to pull that pin out.

[00:03:56]You saw we made a couple of attempts to fix the issue. Eventually got the pin to start retracting again, but hit the same motion hold. Ultimately ran out of time.

[00:04:04]The team though made some hardware, some software changes to get us into a better position to fly today. We had the tower team up there last night. They welded in some hardware that's going to cut down on the motion of the arm as it's pushing back when the pins released. And getting all the data we saw on how this hardware interacts in those critical moments.

[00:04:21]went in, looked at our software, all of our logic, see where we were overly conservative, where we may have had holds built on the wrong readings or the wrong times. Overall though, really fast work by the engineering teams put us in a position for flight today. Heroic work by our logistics teams to get all the propellant out there. But things are looking really good for launch at the moment. Right behind me, all of the flight controllers on console, looking at the rocket, looking at the pad, looking at the range, all the systems as we countd down to liftoff. Propellant load is underway. You can see the rocket the rocket getting frosty. We're on track to launch at the top of our window at 5:30 p.m. Central time. Weather has been gorgeous. Thank you to everybody who was outside yelling at clouds that got us weather yesterday. It extended into today and we are looking at a green range right now. Functionally, today's countdown identical to yesterday. Looks very similar to previous Starship flight tests. Some minor differences in timing on things like when we start propellant load, when the water starts flowing on the diverter, when our engines start up, but all the hardware is new. New booster, new ship, new engines, new pad.

[00:05:24]Let's do another quick look at everything that's debuting today with Starship version 3. As Kate noted, some of the outside will look familiar, but we've made extensive upgrades across the entire system. Big picture, cuz Starship's still very, very big. It's just over 407 ft tall, fully stacked, a little bit taller than version two. Have more propellant in both stages. On the bottom half, our super heavy booster has some visible structural changes on the outside. On its top, we've got an integrated hot stage now. Got rid of the one-time use ones. So, we're doing that for reusability. The ship's uh Raptor engines are going to be igniting directly into the top of the booster.

[00:06:03]That's where you're looking right now.

[00:06:05]All of that force and heat offset by the pressure inside the booster's fuel tank and a thin layer of nonstructural steel.

[00:06:12]The grid fins on the booster, which we used to steer on descent, went from four down to three, but we made them 50% larger. Higher strength, also used them for lift, and we'll use them for catch on future missions when we bring the booster back. We redesigned the fuel transfer tube inside the booster. That's what's sending all of that massive amount of liquid methane down to those 33 engines. lets us light all 33 at the same time and have faster, more reliable flips. The bottom of the booster looks very different with those Raptor 3 engines. We deleted all of the bulky engine shrouds from previous generations, all of the prop, avionics hardware, everything for that. Super tightly integrated now, protected by much slimmer shielding. Up on the second stage, Starship version 3 designed to carry massive orbital payloads up to 100 metric tonses to Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars. Biggest changes inside the vehicle itself. Propulsion system got a complete redesign, increased our propellant intake volume, improved our steering on orbit. Uh in the payload bay, the PEZ dispenser supercharged.

[00:07:14]That's going to increase the deploy speed for each of our satellites. We've got 22 payload deployables in there today. It's the heaviest we've ever carried on Starship. Eventually, we'll have up to 60 planned of those Starlink V3 satellites. Uh also on the ship, we added docking ports. There's two right below the payload bay door, two near the bottom. That's going to enable us to have Starships link up in orbit for propellant transfer. Also modified the connection point in the ship to facilitate that. So lot of upgrades tip totail and still powering it all is the Raptor 3.

[00:07:47]Now those engines are manufactured in Hawthorne, California, tested in McGregor, Texas. redesigned their ignition system, bumped up the thrust and the sea level and the vacuum engines and then took all of the sensors, feed lines, controllers, everything that was kind of the busy sections around Raptors 1 and two and either deleted them or internally integrated and protected them inside the engine. That dramatically cut down on the weight, made it easier for those to manufacture. So, just an incredible amount of effort from the world's best engineering team getting this rocket to the pad ready to launch today. I'm gonna stop talking for a little bit. That was a lot. Send it back down to Kate and Jake for more on pad two.

[00:08:27]>> Yeah. So, like Dan was just saying, uh, the team has been working hard on a brand new rocket, but we also redesigned the ground systems, and that brand new pad 2 is making its debut today. We took everything we learned from operating on pad 1 to create this totally new launchpad. Pad 2 is optimized for full and rapid reusability. We've upgraded our propellant farm with much more storage and more pumps to enable super fast filling for launch and relaunch.

[00:08:57]And on the tower, we changed to shorter chopsticks. Those are that's the black assembly there at the top of the tower.

[00:09:03]And that enables even faster motion to better track vehicles flying in for catch.

[00:09:09]>> Yeah. And we also changed the actuators driving those chopsticks from hydraulics to 100% electromechanical, increasing their speed, redundancy, and reliability. On the ground, the launch mount was also completely redesigned.

[00:09:23]And if I had to describe it in one word, I'd say robust, but it's also smarter.

[00:09:29]We've separated the fuse the fuel and ox systems into different compartments and reposition the booster quick disconnects to be out of the vehicle's plume during liftoff. And as you can see there on your screen, we also have a new birectional flame diverter and a new top deck flame deflector to eliminate metal wearing down. So, we said goodbye to the pancake. However, this will help us get to zero refurbishment between launches.

[00:09:54]Now, this pad is still built for maximum safety and fast turnaround because making life multilanetary will require launching a lot of Starships. Now, it's currently tminus 18 minutes and 38 seconds. We're gonna hop over to Hawthorne for a moment for more on Starlink with Tyler Lionquist. Tyler, >> hey Kate, thank you so much. I'm Tyler Lionquist and I'm a Starlink business analyst here at SpaceX. We're excited to be back here in Hawthorne ready for another attempt at a launch today. So, as we talked about yesterday, on today's flight, we're deploying 20 Starlink simulators, plus two modified Starlink satellites, which our team internally refers to as Dodger Dogs, because they stretch the V2 mini satellite propellant tank so that it sticks out from both ends of the satellite. And the Dodger dog serves as a tech demo between the V2 and the V3 Starling satellites and acts as a platform for testing V3 components.

[00:10:50]Now, the larger V3 satellites aim to greatly expand our network's capacity, while V3 hardware is designed to support faster Wi-Fi and improved broadband speeds for our customers while providing significant capacity upgrades from the V2 Mini. So, in addition to delivering future V3 satellites to the Starlink network, Starship is also planned to launch our AI satellites. And as you may have seen during the Terapab event in Austin a few months ago, Elon laid out the path to revolutionize cloud computing and AI infrastructure, leveraging the unlimited power of the sun, targeting 100 gawatt to 1 terowatt of AI computing power annually. And from there, we're looking at connectivity beyond our planet too. Building on the technologies used to connect people on Earth, the Starlink team is exploring using Starlink to enable high bandwidth connectivity around the moon. With a constellation of satellites designed to connect to user terminals on the lunar surface, we could relay data back to our Starlink constellation in Earth orbit.

[00:11:50]So, traditionally, deep space comms have relied on radio frequency transmission.

[00:11:55]But this new design would use lasers to relay data back to Earth, which can massively increase the bandwidth available to future lunar missions. We currently have thousands of lasers operating in our Starling constellation around Earth. And deploying that technology around the moon could connect it with hundreds of terabytes of capacity. Together, this could provide the connectivity backbone between the Earth and the Moon and enable gigabit connectivity anywhere on the lunar surface, providing data for rovers, habitats, and astronauts, and hopefully some incredible views for us back on Earth, too. So, all of that adds up to a lot of satellites, but the good news is there's still plenty of space in space.

[00:12:34]That said, the Starling team takes space safety extremely seriously and works hard to encourage best practices across the entire industry. so space stays open for as many people as possible. In fact, just yesterday, the Starlink team published a new update on starlink.com to encourage all satellite operators to better coordinate and follow best practices to keep space safe. So, for more on safety, go to starlink.com/updates.

[00:12:59]And with that, let's kick kick it back over to Kate and Jake and Starbase for today's mission profile. Thanks, Tyler.

[00:13:06]Now, let's dive into the flight profile for today's test. As we've mentioned already a couple of times, uh there are numerous redesigns making their debut today across the entire launch vehicle.

[00:13:17]In light of this, we want to keep our learning focused on all of that new hardware and software. So, we're running a flight profile that's similar to past Starship flights in order to minimize any new variables.

[00:13:29]>> Yeah, that's right. So, as always, we start with liftoff where Superheavy ignites 33 of those brand new Raptor 3 engines. We power through a scent ahead of hot stage separation where the booster shuts down all but five sustainer engines. Stage two then lights its Raptor engines while still attached to Superheavy where we see stage separation debuting the integrated hot stage directional booster flip and engine relight for boost back using 33 engines. And after coasting for a few minutes, the booster today will target a landing burn and soft splashdown a few miles off from the coast of Starbase.

[00:14:05]ship keeps it going with ascent burn to a suborbital trajectory. Then we'll deploy 20 Starlink simulator satellites and two Dodger dogs as we affectionately call them. We also plan to relight a single Raptor engine. Next will be re-entry a few minutes later. For the first time in a while, uh we're intentionally not messing with Starship's heat shield. At that point, we should have some amazing views of the ship's technicolor re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. If all of that goes as planned, we'll finish the test with a landing flip, a landing burn, and a soft water splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

[00:14:37]And in just a few moments, thanks to Starlink, we'll be going live to the Indian Ocean and chatting once again with the ship recovery team stationed out there.

[00:14:46]>> Yeah, I'm super excited about that.

[00:14:48]That's going to be totally awesome. Uh but sit tight uh because first we're going to go to Dan for a quick status check.

[00:14:53]>> Yep. Hey everybody, good news. Still looking good. Uh range is green currently. We're expecting another update on that in just about 4 minutes.

[00:15:00]That should be our final determination.

[00:15:02]Weather continues to look amazing.

[00:15:04]Vehicle and pad both looking healthy. We are a little over 80% on fuel. 95 unlocks in the ship and then a little more than 2/3 it's looking like on booster. So, we are on track today.

[00:15:17]Looking good for a launch right now at 5:30 p.m. Central time.

[00:15:24]All right. So, we're going to do that right at the top of our window. Once again though, we're going to be targeting to send Starship around the world for a splash down in the Indian Ocean. We had a really quick check-in yesterday with the Starship recovery team out there on station. They're helping us to maintain the range and a whole lot more. So, let's jump back out there once more. Today, we've got Serenai joining us live from the boat deck out in the in Ocean couple hundred miles off the coast of Australia. Seren, how's it going, man? Welcome to the flight 12 web webcast. How's everything looking out there in the landing zone, >> Dan? It's a It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:15:57]I'm not going to lie to you. It's a little rougher than it was yesterday.

[00:16:00]Nighttime, it's hard to see the horizon, but we're looking at about 10 foot seas, and we're we're loving it, but but it's rough.

[00:16:07]>> All right. What's what's what's your guys' primary job out there? I mean, you're you're out kind of in the middle of nowhere. What are you guys doing?

[00:16:16]So like as you mentioned like it's usually a 5 to 600 nautical mile uh sail from shore and our our primary goal is as a range clearing group. So like we come out here and make sure there's no one else in the area so the rocket can launch. But that kind of allows us to do our second goal which is to conduct uh imagery of of the rocket as it re-enters and as it splashes down. We get a lot of other data, but like the primary one is for sure imagery with an ensemble of maritime and aerial based assets >> and and talk to us a little bit because it's evolved over time kind of humble beginnings of getting those views to talk us through where we've gotten to now today.

[00:16:56]>> Yeah, I think some people know but like the market bots are are quite identifiable. That's the buoys that we use and they uh were originally used as sailboat racers and we kind of put them in as as a hailmary attempt on flight 5 to get imagery of of the rocket as it came down. And we all thought it maybe would have worked, but we were super shocked and really pleased to see all of the the buoys pointed right at the rocket as it came down, which was a testament to not only the the scrappy engineering we were able to put together, but also the rocket's ability to land right on target. And then since then, we've kind of iterated more and more and and these buoys have become way more robust and have now a lot more data collection materials, not just visual imagery. And as a result, they they kind of are the most mature versions they've ever been. And it's really cool because almost all the buoys that we're deploying even now for flight 12, we just got them off our back deck a few few hours ago, are the exact same ones that were used for flight 5.

[00:17:54]>> And I saw a couple of user terminals.

[00:17:56]how Starlink kind of playing a role in this entire operation.

[00:18:01]>> Dan, I'm not going to lie to you. If we didn't have Starlink out here, we would be screwed. Um, like just on a on like a usual basis of like working, we're allowed to like have calls with each other and like work on documents with each other, send things to each other in like a very timely manner because of the Starlink on the boat. Uh but but not only that, each one of these buoys is equipped with a standard Starlink mini, the one you would just get from like uh ordering it commercially and and that allows us to not only operate the buoy remotely, but also to get live stream data and telemetry, which is honestly super useful. And I don't think we have another solution for it without Starlink.

[00:18:37]>> All right, before I let you go, what's it like? You're out there and then all of a sudden Starship appears out of the sky. What's that feel like, man?

[00:18:46]>> Dan, I can't lie to you. Feels it feels awesome. Just like being on the boat, not seeing any land for miles and miles and then hearing the Starship crack down with its sonic booms and watching it breach through the sky. It is one of the most magical feelings on Earth and really excited to feel that again today.

[00:19:02]>> All right. Well, thanks Surin. Good luck, man. Hopefully we're sending a rocket your way real soon. Thanks for joining us in, man. I'm going to send it now back down to Kate and Jake for the latest progress we're making at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

[00:19:15]>> Thanks, Dan. Now, if we want to get to the moon and then Mars as fast as possible, there's really only one answer, and it's to launch a lot more rockets.

[00:19:24]>> Yeah. And to do that, we're going to need a few more launch pads and support buildings, which is exactly what we're working on over in Florida. So, originally built for Apollo and then the space shuttle, launch complex 39A has flown 126 Falcon missions since SpaceX reactivated the pad in 2017.

[00:19:42]>> Yeah, I actually remember the day that we did that. I was able to host the live webcast for that first launch out of pad 39A and it was just so amazing to see that pad come back to life and it's also exciting to see how today almost 10 years later the ongoing uh excuse me ongoing construction as you see there on your screen uh and the development that will bring a second launch tower to launch complex 39A. It's designed to expand our capabilities to support Starship launches in the future while also continuing to support Falcon Heavy missions from the original Apollo shuttle Falcon launch tower.

[00:20:20]>> Yeah, and we're not done. We're also building a Starship launchpad at Slick 37. And to support the uptick in future launches, there's Gigabay, a giant assembly and maintenance facility designed to prep starships ahead of Florida launches. And when complete, this huge structure aims to hold 24 work cells in over 800,000 square feet of workspace. It's gonna be a big building.

[00:20:43]>> So much space.

[00:20:45]>> So yeah, SpaceX's Florida uh SpaceX's future in Florida is quickly t taking shape with our very first launches on the horizon.

[00:20:52]>> Exactly. A horizon that aims for regular trips to the moon. And speaking of moon, we've got another special guest for you today, Dan. I think the last time you and I were on a webcast with this person was Polaris Dawn as he was performing the very first commercial spacew walk.

[00:21:10]>> That's right, Kate and Jared. I I don't know if today will be quite as cool as doing a spacew walk, but we're going to try our best to make it as exciting.

[00:21:16]Like, thanks for joining us here today, man. You had a heck of an entrance on the way in.

[00:21:21]>> It's great to be here. Yep. Certainly great to do a little bit of a flyby. I think they should accompany all the great rocket launches and we certainly got a great uh great rocket out there on the pad. But uh wonderful to be back and no surprise it's always changing here.

[00:21:33]It looks amazing.

[00:21:34]>> I was going to say it's been a couple of years. What was what was your impression flying in? It just the lay of the land.

[00:21:40]>> Well, I was I think it was actually maybe 10 months ago I was here slinging pizzas. I got a new job now, but um it was uh it it there's been so much that's changed even since then. Uh yeah, the facilities look amazing. All the housing that's coming in here and of course you got two orbital launch pads out there and a rocket that's just looking fantastic, especially from the air. It's good.

[00:21:59]>> Yeah. You said you got a new job. It's been a slow start to your first 6 months. I mean, you only sent humans around the moon for the first time since the Apollo days. Bill and I kind of nerded out a little bit. Like that was that was the last thing I worked on when I was at NASA. So seeing them go was just insane. Like how's everybody feeling after the success of Artemis 2?

[00:22:18]>> Well, I'd say I have the best job in the world and I certainly work with an unbelievable team. I mean, as you know, that was a that mission was a long time in the making. So, I just I got to show up at the at the right time to see everybody uh put all that effort to uh put it in action. But what a great mission. Those four astronauts, you couldn't have had better uh better ambassadors for humankind to the stars.

[00:22:37]I mean, they really brought us all along for 10 days. And we're getting ready for what comes next. We're going to start stacking Artemis 3. We got a lot of the hardware in the VAB already. We're hoping to even get out to the pad before the end of the year, do another wet dress. So, all right. And uh we're looking forward to seeing this thing fly cuz uh hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we're going to we're going to join up in uh in Earth orbit.

[00:22:56]>> Yeah. Want I mean what's coming up next?

[00:22:59]And ultimately like base on the moon that's that's the big focus like what's what's kind of the why like why are we doing this for everybody?

[00:23:06]>> Oh well I mean and and yes we were we're certainly trying to get back to the moon but what's coming up next? We're also we're also building a moon base in parallel. And why are we doing that?

[00:23:14]Well it's for a lot of the shirts I see around here which is Occupy Mars. I mean, what a great opportunity. Go to the moon, return to the moon, build a moon base on the South Pole, interact with the water ice, right? Maybe work on some of those skills we're going to need when we're 4 days away from home for what we might need someday when we're 9 months away from home. But we got other things coming up, too. You got Nancy Grace Roman. That that telescope's going to launch later this summer. There's a lot of great exciting things going on at NASA right now.

[00:23:38]>> Yeah, man. All right. Well, SpaceX, we're we're customuilt to try and make life multilanetary. We're super honored, excited to be part of this entire Aremis program. Uh really excited to see Starship, you know, sending people to the moon, all of the different pieces working together. It's going to be a really exciting future.

[00:23:56]>> Oh, absolutely. Well, thanks for having me here. It's great uh great to see everybody again. I know a lot of hard work leads up to a moment like this. So, uh we're all rooting for you and uh we're looking forward to meeting up next year in Earth orbit.

[00:24:07]>> All right, man. Well, I'll let you jump back in there. We got about four minutes to go. Toss it back down to Kate and Jake. Yeah, I think it's safe to say we could listen to you guys yap about the moon pretty much all day. It's so inspiring to hear about the future of exploration on the moon. And if you caught the show yesterday, you also heard some more future space exploration news.

[00:24:27]>> Yeah, that's right. From 2 mission commander Chun Wang will be one of the first humans to become an interplanetary traveler. Don't think I've ever said that word before. While also joining Starship's first mission to fly past the moon. Yeah, >> incredible.

[00:24:43]>> Amazing. In fact, that Dragon capsule that you saw there was Dragon Resilience. That is the same uh Dragon spacecraft that administrator Isaac Ben flew in both Inspiration 4 and Polaris Dawn. So, it's a good one. Now, Dan, uh we're now coming back into uh a terminal count again. Anticipation is definitely growing as we proceed towards our second attempt. Once again, this is the first flight. We're aiming to fly the first for the first time, Starship version three. Massive upgrades across the vehicle that you see at the pad there as well as the pad itself.

[00:25:21]The good news is we've had a pretty quiet countdown today. We are looking at a green range still not tracking any issues with our weather, with the vehicle or with the pad for a launch. We are now getting into the phase where we're closing out prop load on the ship.

[00:25:37]And then booster is going to close out in about 15 seconds or so. Once we're fully done with this, you're looking at 11 12 million plus pounds of liquid propellant on board Starship and Super Heavy. We're going to get the pad itself ready. Push back all of the propellant that's in those lines running from the farm up to the launch mount. Uh just kind of harden the area and get it ready for launch. We're going to peek inside hopefully. See the engines do a little wiggle as we do our final steering check. That'll happen at tminus 100 seconds and then after we get through tminus 40. If you tuned in yesterday, you're very familiar. If we need to hold, we can go into what's called rapid recycle essentially where we can hang out at tminus 40 seconds. It's built in.

[00:26:21]We're only going to hold if there's an issue. Not currently tracking one. They can pop up after we pass t-minus 40, but right now we're looking good. Hopefully going to move right past that.

[00:26:31]>> And then once we do pass t-minus 40 seconds, a number of events will occur in quick succession. That is when the QD vent gate or quick disconnect vent gate will clear the gas commodity lines that connect the pad to the vehicles. Both the ship and the booster will configure their comm systems for flight and will rapidly run leak checks on gas and fluid tanks. And the booster goes to internal power and its engines will get their final priming for launch while the ship's engines begin their ascent bleed profile and arms the automatic flight safety system.

[00:27:05]>> Yeah. And once we pass t-minus 40 seconds, we still have the ability to rapidly recycle the count under certain conditions. Back to t-minus 40 seconds.

[00:27:16]Looks like we might be getting some engine wiggles here. As Dan mentioned earlier, these allow us to check out the thrust vector control actuators on these engines.

[00:27:28]It's important to make sure that they can steer. Yeah, that's definitely right. And the flame diverter on pad 2 activates at around t-minus 17 seconds and enters what is essentially the point of no return at Tminus 10 seconds. If we have a hold close to t-minus 17 seconds, there's a chance we could recycle, but the closer we get to tus 10, the lower that chance becomes, we just heard we're at t-minus 1 minute.

[00:27:51]>> Yeah. So, at this point in time, we're going to stop talking. We're going to let the rocket take over and listen to some amazing pad sounds of the first flight of Starship version 3.

[00:28:10]All right, we are holding. We were just waiting for the fuel push backs to complete into the prop farm. We did hear that that did just complete. So, expecting them to reset that hold shortly.

[00:28:28]Cold is reset. Clock is rolling.

[00:28:35]Flight directors go for launch.

[00:28:55]Nice. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 ignition.

[00:29:09]We have set you down range.

[00:29:31]This opter chamber pressure nominal.

[00:29:38]All right, we are T plus 30 seconds into flight. C 33 out of 33. Raptor 3 engines on booster V3 ascending over the Gulf now. Coming up on maximum aerodynamic pressure.

[00:29:53]>> Booster and ship. Avionics power telemetry nominal.

[00:29:58]>> Systems looking good. We're just passing through the period of maximum dynamic pressure.

[00:30:08]Little over a minute into flight now.

[00:30:12]Vibrations chilling out here at Star Factory as we continue to watch Starship flight 12 arc out over the Gulf. The next major thing coming up is going to be hot staging >> booster prop system.

[00:30:26]>> Reminder, we do what's our version of MCO. Most engines cut off. So, we're going to shut down all but five of the Raptor engines on the booster.

[00:30:37]And then after that happens, we're going to ignite the six engines on ship while it is still attached.

[00:30:45]We have clamps that hold the two together. Those are going to retract inside of that hot stage ring. Kind of protect them.

[00:30:54]Look like we had one of the engines go out. Still flying on 32 of the Raptor engines. But again, uh once we get the hot staging, those uh six engines on the ship are going to ignite.

[00:31:07]We're going to do it in a little bit different of a of a sequence on version three. Essentially, those three Arvac engines will ignite first. Almost immediately after, just one of those central engines is going to ignite, and that's going to give the booster a bit of a kick, sending it in a known direction, followed shortly after by the other two.

[00:31:34]We're through. Mo separation.

[00:31:45]>> There you go. Successful hot staging separation.

[00:31:51]We are not seeing as many booster engines ignite as we expected for boost back, but we are seeing six good engines lit on ship.

[00:32:00]It looks like we just had an early boost back shutdown. Again, a reminder, the booster was planned to essentially head into the Gulf uh for a splashdown, but it has shut its engines down early on into boostback.

[00:32:18]And we just see one of the ARVAC. So we're now running on five engines on ship.

[00:32:28]We do have engine out capability. So it's going to continue into its ascent.

[00:32:36]You got booster on the left there. Ship on the right.

[00:32:41]>> Avionics power. Not planning on bringing the booster back for this flight as this was the very first time.

[00:32:57]All right, so we're about 3 minutes 50 seconds into today's flight. Uh just a reminder, the the ship planned to burn its engines uh for about 8 minutes and change. Uh about 8 minutes and 11 seconds was our planned timeline for today. Uh that could shift slightly as we do have one engine out running on one fewer Arvacs.

[00:33:27]Again, continuing to watch. So booster did not complete its boost back burn. We did not see all of the engines ignite that we expected.

[00:33:36]Are continuing to get some views from it though. that's going to make a splash down somewhere in the in the Gulf.

[00:33:43]Reminder, we clear air, sea space, everything uh for these launches.

[00:34:00]All right, so we are coming up on T + 5 minutes.

[00:34:07]Ship continuing to fire. Five of the six.

[00:34:15]Standing by for callouts. Making sure ship's on its planned trajectory. Again, we are planning a suborbital trajectory for the ship today.

[00:34:27]Booster giving us some views as it continues to make its way back down towards the water.

[00:34:37]All right. So, a little over five and a half minutes in flight. Kate, Jake, you guys with me? Looks like booster starting to come in hot.

[00:34:45]>> Yeah, we had a the opportunity to stand outside to watch launch and wow, that was incredible.

[00:34:52]>> Yeah, that was really loud, really shaky, and I was actually surprised how fast the booster got off the pad or the whole stack. That was that was quite incredible.

[00:35:00]>> Absolutely. Okay, so we have views here from the booster coming back down, making its way into the Gulf.

[00:35:08]Pretty cool to see.

[00:35:09]>> We have healthy chamber pressures on five out of six ship engines.

[00:35:12]>> Great news there for Starship.

[00:35:21]>> Once again, we were not going to bring the super heavy booster back to the tower. We were planning on having it land in the Gulf.

[00:35:37]>> And it looks like the booster ended its mission there in the Gulf, but we've got a ship still flying. Great to see that.

[00:35:45]Still have five out of six engines there on S39.

[00:35:48]>> Yes, we also heard good chamber pressures as well on those engines that are lit. We do have engine out capability. We do see that we have one of the Arvac, one of the Raptor vacuum engines that is currently out, but that's okay. Ship is continuing on.

[00:36:04]Amazing views of planet Earth there in the background.

[00:36:10]Yeah, I love the S39 decal there. That just gives the gives the ship a little bit of character. And again, all these great views brought to you by Starlink, of course.

[00:36:27]Yeah, obligatory shout out to the entire Starship avionics camera electronics team did a whole lot of work to to get these upgraded cameras. A look inside of the ship skirt. You can see those three center engines ignited. The Arvax continuing to fire as well.

[00:36:45]We did we did see at least a couple engines fire up on booster for that landing burn before we lost contact with it.

[00:36:53]We should have just a little over 20 seconds to go. We'll see if the burn extends a little bit uh for the engine out. Essentially, you can run your engines a little bit longer or throttle up a little bit more to account for the the one engine not being lit. So right now we are standing by for seco.

[00:37:28]And again, we are continuing to go a little bit longer.

[00:37:41]Five engines still burning on ship.

[00:38:00]We are coming up on t plus 9 minutes and starting to see shut down.

[00:38:22]Arvacs have shut down. Sea levels have shut down.

[00:38:37]Seeing if we can get an update on the ship orbit insertion, but we have shut down again. We did run longer as we were engine out. We were flying with five of those six Raptors pretty much the whole time.

[00:38:53]>> Ship FTS is saved.

[00:39:08]All right. Well, we definitely got a ship in space right now.

[00:39:31]As you can see, the teams are incredibly excited to see Starship there in space.

[00:39:36]We are awaiting the call out of nominal uh uh insertion. So, we're going to stand by for that. We can see the flaps uh moving here, actuating. But, wow, the the cheers here in the lobby are certainly almost as loud as liftoff was.

[00:39:52]>> Yeah. Yeah, man. Lot of action going on.

[00:39:55]And you know, we said it at the top of the show, excitement guaranteed. And we're only 11 minutes in. We still have a lot more to go here on the mission today. So, uh, all objectives are done on the booster. So, now all eyes are on the ship as we get ready for our in space objectives.

[00:40:13]>> Exactly. So, like I said, we're still standing by to hear the call out for nominal orbital insertion, but we've got a few minutes uh before the next milestone. So, we're going to continue.

[00:40:24]We've got some amazing views here of the ship. Wow. It's just that this is our planet. This is our home.

[00:40:40]As a reminder, the objectives for ship today uh not only included the separation that we saw uh but we're also planning to deploy 20 uh Starlink simulator satellites as well as two Dodger dog satellites. It that's what our internal teams refer our to as our uh our newer satellites. Um we saw a preview of those earlier. We should see those deployments here in a little bit.

[00:41:08]We're also hoping to perform uh a relight of a Raptor engine as well.

[00:41:12]>> Yep, that's exactly right. And the relight will look a little bit different this time. We're hoping to get a little bit of a longer duration. Of course, we got to see once we get there. And uh that relight won't actually be changing our orbit necessarily, but we're doing it more so as a technology demonstration.

[00:41:46]For those of you that maybe just recently tuned in, you missed an a a a pretty exciting almost 13 minutes. Uh we had a liftoff uh pretty much on time almost right exactly at 5:30 p.m. We did have a brief hold at the t-minus 42nd period, but we were able to proceed through that and we saw a gorgeous liftoff. Uh Jake and I were able to stand outside and witness that with all of our colleagues and what a moment.

[00:42:14]I'll tell you what, it is a heck of a lot louder here than it was at Ad Astra.

[00:42:20]>> Absolutely. And um a couple things I noticed on the way uphill today on the ship. So uh obviously it looks like we lost one of the Arvacs on the way, but um that is a good way to demonstrate our potential engine out capability there.

[00:42:34]So and I think we actually saw the three gimbling engines kind of gimble over a little bit to compensate for that offset and thrust. So that was really cool.

[00:42:43]That's something I know the team's been uh we've analyzed that since flight one all the way back. So, um, it's something that we've thought about quite a bit and, uh, it was kind of cool to see it in action in in real life today.

[00:42:54]>> Yeah, absolutely.

[00:42:56]If you couldn't tell, Jake is on the Raptor team.

[00:42:58]>> Yeah. But one, uh, one non-rafteraptor thing I noticed also back on the uh, when we had the shot of the aft flaps.

[00:43:06]Uh, it's it's a little little weird. We have tiles on the leeward side. So, uh, not on the side where we're going to see heating. And you might be asking, why are we putting tiles there? I had the same question actually. Act actually. So I talked to some of our heat shield engineers the other day and we're actually running Yeah, here's the shot right here. Great. So the fact that we're seeing all these tiles still on the flap right now is really good cuz that actually was one of our experiments where we wanted to test different connection methods uh on the way uphill on ship. So actually a scent. So it looks like most if not all the tiles are still hanging on there. So that's actually a really good data point.

[00:43:44]>> Looks pretty good to me. Now once again this view is from the side of Starship which is uh basically the second stage of the Starship vehicle as a whole. This is one of the flaps on the vehicle that helps to control its position and attitude as it is orbiting and also helps to control during re-entry as well. That's a critical phase. Um I mentioned earlier that we're hoping to deploy those Starlink satellite uh simulators as well as um perform an inspace relight of a Raptor engine. If all of that goes well, we will be targeting a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. We heard from Seren on the recovery team a little bit earlier.

[00:44:27]They are standing by waiting uh to receive the ship that we see here.

[00:44:35]All right, let's send it upstairs. Dan, how's it looking?

[00:44:40]>> Hey guys, we are looking good. It does look like we are within bounds of what we analyzed if we were down one of our ARVAC engines. So, I wouldn't call it nominal orbital insertion, but we're in an on a trajectory that we had analyzed and it's within bounds. So, uh team's continuing to work through it with that engine out. They're working some through some steps on the engines. We probably will end up skipping the Raptor relight um for today, but it sounds like we should still be on for payload deploy at least at this time. So, very dynamic moments right here with the ship. Uh but we do have it in space. It is on a trajectory now headed towards the other side of the planet and then a splash down in the Indian Ocean.

[00:45:30]It's going to start to get darker. We're heading into an orbital sunset. Um, so we're gonna we're gonna have darkness for a little bit and then it'll brighten up once we're on the other side of the planet and hopefully looking at some uh some good daylight when we reenter into the Indian Ocean.

[00:46:18]All right, so we're a little over 17 minutes into flight. If you're just now catching up with us, uh we did see a liftoff right at the top of our window.

[00:46:28]Uh Super Heavy getting off the pad, initially lighting all 33 of those Raptor engines. Got through a successful hot staging. initially lit six engines on ship. Had one Arvac go out on the way uphill, but still able to make it into space.

[00:46:43]And right now we're trying to see if we are going to get into payload deploy still.

[00:46:52]We're coming up right on the part of the timeline when we were expecting it. You look inside a starship there. I see a door opening.

[00:47:02]Looks like Hal didn't wait. PEZ door is open. Just a reminder, we've got 22 deployables in the payload bay today. 20 of those Starlink mass simulators and then two are our dodger dogs as we like to call them internally. Uh sitting up their modified V2 Starlink satellites.

[00:47:25]Those are going to be testing a bunch of components that we're planning to fly on uh Starlink V3 and we've also got them outfitted with a number of cameras for another tech demo that we're trying out on this flight. We definitely are looking for a way that we can look at uh Starship's heat shield while it's still in space. You can kind of only see so much from the cameras and the flaps. you can't see everything kind of on the underbelly and one of the only ways you can do that is if you got something else flying near it. So, uh we're going to attempt to uh our final two satellites going out the door have a suite of cameras on them that are going to be looking back at the ship. We're going to be in nighttime and so we've got sounds like we're getting into payload deploy. We'll be in nighttime. They've got some powerful uh flashlights on them to try and illuminate the ship's heat shield while we fly away from it. So, we see some PEZ motion.

[00:48:52]Pew, pew.

[00:49:06]Two down, 20 to go.

[00:49:14]As a reminder, that's that's one of the things that we upgraded in version three. Kind of gave the a little soup up to the the PEZ dispensers. So, those satellites going to move out a little bit quicker than they did on previous uh Starship flight tests.

[00:49:32]So, first two out the door, two more on their way out.

[00:49:55]All right, four down, 18 to go.

[00:50:04]>> Flexing my basic math skills here today.

[00:50:07]Again, the majority of this stack, 20 of these 22 satellites, they're essentially just mass simulators. So, they're roughly the same size as those Starlink V3 sats that we're hoping to fly later this year.

[00:50:35]And from this top down view, so you're looking down at the stack, those two satellites you see on the very top that they'll look very different. They've got solar arrays. They've got a bunch of other deployables on them that we're going to be testing out that are going to be V3 tech. And they've got uh three engineering cameras and then one other camera that's hopefully going to be giving us some views of Starship in space.

[00:51:02]But we will we will see how that works.

[00:51:04]Again, this very much a tech demo. We're going to deploy those. The satellite's going to kind of try and turn everything on, look back at Starship. And the primary reason we're trying to do this is to get some views of the heat shield.

[00:51:23]All right, two more out the door.

[00:51:26]>> Two more out the door. And I think that counts. Uh that comes up to eight total.

[00:51:33]USA.

[00:51:36]>> As you can tell, the teams are stoked to see this demonstration happening. Uh it's it's pretty incredible to see this happening live from space. Now, as we noted earlier in the show, but worth repeating, this Starship version 3 is built to deploy up to 60 of Starlink's more advanced V3 satellites.

[00:51:57]Everything's V3. designed to offer 60 terabits per second of downlink capacity per satellite. Now, that is 20 times more than each Falcon 9 does today.

[00:52:09]Incredible.

[00:52:12]All right, I think that's number 10 going out the door.

[00:52:18]Yeah, there it goes.

[00:52:24]So yeah, the camera view you have on your left screen there is basically right at the bottom of the payload volume. So the kind of dome-shaped uh structure you see there is that's actually the top of the fuel tank.

[00:52:41]Then the camera view that you have on the right is an external camera that we have positioned so that you can see basically the light through the open PEZ dispenser door um that you see that's that sliver of light. We can see the Starlinks uh here deploying as each one comes through.

[00:53:08]As we mentioned, we have 20 of these Starlink simulator satellites. And then we have two of these specially modified um as we call them, dodger dogs here around here. Uh those, as Dan mentioned earlier, they have some V3 tech on them, some solar arrays, and uh those will be the last two that will be deployed today.

[00:53:31]>> Yeah, that's right. And uh seeing this like as I think Dan called him turbocharged or supercharged uh PEZ dispenser uh it's definitely coming out much faster than our previous flights.

[00:53:43]So that is really good to see. Uh yeah, look at that.

[00:53:52]And especially once we, you know, fill Starship up all the way with around 60 or so of these Starlinks, being able to deploy them fairly expediently, uh, you know, is going to be important for designing the overall mission profile.

[00:54:06]>> Yeah.

[00:54:08]Now, fans of Starship may know that Starlink enables lots of unprecedented views both from space, as we see here, and on Earth. In addition to the dozens of cameras on Starship itself, we also have mobile Starlink camera kits deployed in the Indian Ocean.

[00:54:26]>> Yes, Starlink also connects our aerial cinematography units on the ground at Starbase and at other strategic camera spots around Texas.

[00:54:37]>> It's all part of how it all comes together to tell the incredible story of Starship both on and off planet.

[00:54:46]>> Yep.

[00:54:50]All right, we're we're getting low on the stack. It looks like we got two more of those simulators to go out and then it will be time for our Dodger dogs, those modified Starlink satellites.

[00:55:04]Just a couple of updates while we continue to watch payload deploy. did get confirmation we're going to be skipping that relight of the Raptor engine um just due to everything that we saw on the way uphill. Uh those sea level engines, we're going to use them for a landing burn though. They are still capable uh to be used for that.

[00:55:25]So, we'll still look to do a controlled landing in the Gulf, but no inspace relight.

[00:55:36]All right, I think that's 19 and 20 headed out the door.

[00:55:46]And then coming up are our Dodger dogs.

[00:55:48]So, these are modified V2 Starlink satellites.

[00:55:53]We do have a number of cameras on these that are going to attempt to look back at Starship. We're not going to get this video in real time, but we're going to try and turn it around if we do get some video down.

[00:56:06]So we don't worry if we get views of Starship from these satellites we will be sharing and these these will be exciting because again they're really a tech demo getting our chance to test out some of the the technologies for version three.

[00:56:31]All right, I think that's 18 and 20. My basic math skills are failing now. All right, here we go.

[00:56:56]We're standing by for Starship, basically to serve the first Dodger dogs to low Earth orbit.

[00:57:12]and run out the door.

[00:57:18]And from this view, you can kind of see on the right side of the satellite, you see some bright white spots. Those are our flashlights beneath them. The camera is going to attempt to look back and image Starship's heat shield as it flies slowly away from the vehicle.

[00:57:35]And there it goes.

[00:57:44]Let there be light.

[00:57:47]>> Yeah, it almost looks like the light is just shining right at us there.

[00:57:57]>> If you couldn't tell, we're pretty excited.

[00:57:59]>> Yeah, >> it is always sunny in space.

[00:58:03]>> Always sunny in space. And that looks like an empty payload bay. So, sure does. That's exactly what you want to see there. That's great. So, yeah, with payload deploy complete, oh, you can see the door closing there. All right, there we go. So, yeah, with payload deploy complete, Starship will now close this.

[00:58:28]Yeah, Starship uh we closed the payload door and we're going to continue to coast around Earth all the way to the Indian Ocean. So, still a lot of major events to come today. Sounds like we're not going to hit that Raptor relight.

[00:58:40]Um, based on what Dan was saying, but after that, of course, we'll have the atmospheric re-entry and splashdown. And with that, we're going to go on another quick coast >> screen. Currently, the ship is re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. This is the plasma starting to build up on the exterior of the vehicle. Now, we do not plan to recover the spacecraft today, but rapid and reliable reusability is the ultimate goal.

[00:59:03]>> Yeah, that's right. And re-entry is a critical phase of flight. And we need information on how the ship systems perform. Re-entry is an extremely demanding portion of flight where we essentially have to scrub all of the energy we use to launch the rocket back off in reverse. So the 18 million lbs of thrust that we had off 33 of those Raptor engines, >> just a little, >> just a little, we're now and then another, you know, several minute burn on the ship. We're now basically undoing all that energy here, uh, via aerodynamic braking essentially.

[00:59:39]And of course, Starlink is a big part of it as that's what allows us to actually gather this data and show these live views.

[00:59:50]And again, the data gathering is really the main reason why we're doing these flight tests. So, Starlink provides us just one more path to collect that data that ultimately allows us to rapidly iterate Starship's design. Now, if ship manages to make it all the way through re-entry, we'll collect valuable data on the spacecraft flying through the Earth's atmosphere at these hypersonic speeds, uh, which is basically more than five times the speed of sound. Now, we do anticipate that it might be a little bit of a spicy re-entry. So, we'll see how far we get. Re-entry is typically a portion of flight where we don't have communications with the spacecraft because it's re-entering at or around orbital velocity, roughly 8 km/s uh or for those of us that think in other units, roughly 5 miles per second.

[01:00:40]At those speeds, the spacecraft is moving through the atmosphere and it creates that plasma field that we saw uh forming around the vehicle.

[01:00:47]>> Yeah. And although the plasma looks really cool, uh it does distort some communication frequencies. So, it's not uncommon to experience brief blackouts in communication.

[01:01:01]Of course, thinking long term here, Starship is designed to land on Mars where there are no runways or other humans to help out. That's why we're going with the propulsive landing instead of a more traditional means like parachutes.

[01:01:18]Propulsive landing, not only again is it more cool, but it enables a rapid uh a more rapidly reusable uh rocket.

[01:01:25]>> Yeah. Now, we should hear some call outs as the ship makes its way back to Earth.

[01:01:32]When we hear entry max heating and entry max Q, that means the ship has made it through the maximum heating and aerodynamic loads that it will experience as it's as it returns. So, if we make it through those, we're doing pretty well.

[01:01:46]>> Yeah.

[01:01:48]And you can see in the bottom left right now we're at 23 and a half,000 kilometers per hour uh speed. That's just crazy number to think about. Um but as we keep progressing the mission, we are going to hear a call out when the ship is transsonic and then subsonic.

[01:02:09]So transsonic refere ref refers to the period of flight where the velocities of air flow surrounding and flowing past the vehicle are concurrently below at and above the speed of sound kind of in that Mach 0.8 to 1.2 range. And for reference commercial jets have a range of cruising speeds but mostly fly around Mach 74 to Mach.85.

[01:02:37]And after we hear the call out that Starship is transsonic, we should hear the call out when Starship is subsonic.

[01:02:45]This refers to speeds that are much less than the speed of sound. So at this point in the flight, ship's velocity will be slowing down.

[01:02:56]Now we definitely have a crowd still here in the lobby of uh SpaceX headquarters down here at Starbase Texas. Everyone is, you know, loves watching ship re-entry. It's always such amazing colors. It This must be what it feels like to be one of those uh praying mantis shrimp or mantis shrimp. I'm not can't remember exactly what the name is, but the ones that see and billions of colors. This is the closest I feel to being one of those.

[01:03:25]>> Yep. Yep. I think one other thing that's cool to point out right now is uh look in the bottom right, you can see where we are on a globe there. We're squarely in the Indian Ocean already and we've only been flying for 53 minutes. So, pretty crazy. We went all the way from Texas to the Indian Ocean in less than an hour.

[01:03:46]>> Yeah, she flies pretty fast.

[01:03:47]>> She flies very fast.

[01:04:03]All right. So, the light show continuing. We are through the period of peak heating and we'll be looking at the peak pressure coming up in the next couple of minutes. The next 10 minutes are probably going to be the spiciest of entry today. As a reminder, we are going to be doing uh some stress work on this ship where we're going to do a maneuver where we kind of uh kick the nose up to fully deploy those a flaps uh to really get a a good test of the structural strength of that part of the ship. We did that on one previous flight test on version two. We're going to try and do that today. Uh since we did skip the inspace burn, we're carrying a little bit of extra propellant in our header tanks up in the nose and so that's going to put a little bit of extra stress on those forward flaps as we come in. So we will see if they're able to hold through through that re-entry. Um so that will be another watch item. We did skip that in space burn. Uh but we are expecting at least two of those sea level engines to try and ignite for a landing burn. Um we entered the entry period in a good attitude. Um so hopefully making our way to the targeted splashdown point. We've got that Starship recovery team standing by and we should be about 10 minutes away from splashdown. So lot of excitement over the next couple of minutes. Kate and Jake, let's see how Starship holds up on the way in.

[01:05:37]>> Yeah, and we just heard on the nets there that engine chill has started. So, essentially what that means is we are prepping the landing engines by getting them down to temperature ahead of that landing burn later in the mission here.

[01:05:57]And on a lot of our previous flight tests, we've been removing a bunch of the tiles. If you've watched those, we were really intentionally trying to push ship beyond its limits. Uh on the last flight, we even had uh basically a hole get punched into the liquid oxygen tank that you could see when we did the landing burn into the ocean, and this ship was still able to make it. Uh but right now we're we're really going to be testing the structural strength of these flaps on the way in. Again, we're this is a flight test. We're trying to intentionally find where our limits are.

[01:06:32]And in this view, you're looking at a whole bunch of tiles. I think Jake talked about it earlier. We bonded some additional tiles to uh the the leeward or kind of the metal side of Starship to see how those different bonding techniques would hold up. And looking like we've got quite a bit still attached.

[01:06:53]Yeah. And as we're going down through the atmosphere here, we are at about Mach 16.1.

[01:07:01]So, still extremely fast. Uh although we have, you know, scrubbed off a substantial amount of our speed already. Altitude at a little less than 60 km.

[01:07:30]All right, we're about 8 minutes away from our targeted landing and splashdown time. Again, this is when the ship's going to start really >> ship is approaching the end of the peak heating region.

[01:07:44]Just heard the call out getting to the end of the peak heating. So the the highest temperature sh the Starship's going to see during its re-entry.

[01:08:08]This camera angle changes as it is attached to the forward flap on Starship. So, we're actually experiencing the articulation of that hardware helping to steer the ship down for its precise landing in the Indian Ocean.

[01:08:28]>> Yep. That is just a really cool uh kind of cool piece of perspective there. I know some people say it makes them a little seasick, but I definitely love it. makes it feel like you're, you know, you're really riding along with the ship on the way down.

[01:08:44]>> Yeah. And aside from just looking cool, all these camera views providing just really critical data on how the heat shield, how the flaps themselves are holding up. It's why we've got these in the flaps and then all scattered all around the ship so you can see how they hold up. There's some internal to the vehicle too that and we're getting all of this video back via Starlink even as we're just enshrouded in plasma. We're able to kind of operate at a high enough frequency to punch through. And that is blue ocean and sunlight you're seeing just beyond the flap. So, we are coming down into daylight hopefully splashing down in the next 6 minutes or so in the in the Indian Ocean. Uh we've we've still got a couple maneuvers lined up where we're going to be really stressing the flaps on the ship. So >> ship has passed through the peak heating region. External temperatures are coming down.

[01:09:39]>> Wow, that is incredible news. As Dan mentioned, we were expecting this re-entry to be super spicy. Uh but excellent news that we're now past that period of peak heating and that now the external temperatures are starting to decrease.

[01:09:57]those heat shield tiles there on the belly of the ship really doing a ton of work to burn off all of that inertia that the vehicle had uh prior to re-entering the atmosphere.

[01:10:14]>> Yeah. And you can tell by the gmeter down in the bottom right that we're starting to pick up a couple more G's here. So, we're definitely entering the thicker part of the atmosphere where we're scrubbing off all that energy.

[01:10:26]like Kate's saying.

[01:10:32]>> All right, just about 5 minutes or so to go. We're coming up shortly on the the maneuver where we're going to it's affectionately called the the flap slap where we're going to kind of pitch the nose up on the ship and you're going to see those a flaps, the ones in the very bottom fully deploy.

[01:10:55]Ship is at peak dynamic pressure >> and we're now at peak pressure.

[01:11:05]Ship flap load test has started.

[01:11:26]Looks like it's holding.

[01:11:32]>> Again, the intent of that was to put just a lot of extra stress on those a flaps. We are expecting the forward ones too to see a little bit of extra stress as we've got a little more propellant in our header tank. So, the area right at the very nose of flat >> load test is complete.

[01:11:50]>> And we're through that test.

[01:11:53]There we go. And we just did that test at Mach 7 just for reference there. So, we are still going incredibly fast.

[01:12:08]All right, we are just about 3 and 1/2 minutes or so away from our targeted landing burn. Again, we're expecting to try and see two of these Raptor engines light for the landing burn. Normally we plan for three, but we're going to give it a try with two.

[01:12:28]Hopefully we've got >> ship is starting the RTLS banking maneuver >> and that right there. So we're starting a a banking maneuver. And essentially what that is is when we come back to Starbase or when we plan to come back to Starbase, the trajectory is designed so we'll essentially swing out over the Gulf and do a swoop maneuver to then come back to the towers for catch. And so we are doing that exact same maneuver as we head towards our targeted splash down in the Indian Ocean.

[01:13:08]>> Yeah. and that call out there that we heard uh RTLS stands for return to launch site. So definitely a pretty cool thing we're demoing here on the ship, you know, as in the future we are going to be trying to bring the ship back to the launch site, which is going to be absolutely insane.

[01:13:25]>> Absolutely. But of course, we want to test out these maneuvers, these principles prior to actually bringing the hardware back to the pad. This is the same reason why we were um you know intentionally not trying to bring the booster back to the pad. So we're trying all these things out in this developmental phase of the vehicle uh and you know really proving what a test flight is.

[01:13:49]>> Absolutely.

[01:13:49]>> Dynamic pressure is coming down.

[01:13:52]>> All right, we heard there dynamic pressure coming down and I'd say we're in a pretty good bank right now.

[01:13:59]Yeah, executing the power slide. We're about 90 seconds away from our anticipated landing burn. Clouds coming up. Pretty sunrise on the other side of the planet.

[01:14:13]Starship is subsonic and is on target.

[01:14:21]The crowd here reacting to that call out, letting us know that we are on target for this precise landing in the Indian Ocean. This will once again be a soft splashdown.

[01:14:34]We should get some pretty cool views from the recovery team who we chatted with earlier. They are standing by to receive this ship. Once again, this is the first flight of our completely redesigned Starship version three.

[01:14:48]Yeah. And if you remember the suborbital flights from a few years ago, this is very much the same regime that we're in here. So, we're sub 15 km executing what we call the belly flip maneuver.

[01:15:01]Ah, yes. Serial number eight, the first belly flop. I remember it well.

[01:15:15]Just some really amazing views of the Earth as the ship is coming back home.

[01:15:23]Thanks, Starlink.

[01:15:33]>> Yeah, you can see the aft flap there making minor corrections.

[01:15:37]>> Starship is turning for final approach to landing site. Look at that turn.

[01:15:41]>> There we go. Minor corrections and a full turn.

[01:15:47]>> Yeah, Starship doesn't fly like an airplane. It's a lot more like a skydiver.

[01:15:52]Full belly flop on the way down. Using those flaps similar to arms to help change the the the path of the air over you. Coming up real soon.

[01:16:03]Again, going for a landing burn. Trying to light two of these Raptor sea level engines.

[01:16:13]Landing burn start up.

[01:16:15]>> Landing burn start up.

[01:16:18]>> Two engine flip.

[01:16:25]Successful flip.

[01:16:35]shut down.

[01:16:40]Oh, amazing.

[01:17:01]That wall of fire is exactly what we wanted to see for the ship today. As weird as it may sound to to to hear, but it is the truth.

[01:17:12]>> Absolutely wild. We, you know, at the beginning of the show, >> we're pretty hyped.

[01:17:20]>> We guaranteed excitement at the beginning of the show and I'd say Starship delivered.

[01:17:25]>> Absolutely.

[01:17:27]An incredible day for Starship. That was the first flight of that completely redesigned vehicle. Uh, as you could tell, the teams are incredibly proud of, uh, what we just saw.

[01:17:39]>> Yeah, V3 definitely showed up. That was that was amazing.

[01:17:43]>> Yeah.

[01:17:44]>> Yeah. We've, uh, pretty happy crowd in the control room behind me. I will say it's probably the most excited I've seen a lot of people in a in a really long time. Uh, on target landing.

[01:17:57]Wow.