BAD NEWS! SpaceX Starship Flight 12 S39 Just EXPLODED! Reentry to Splashdown! What Exactly Happened?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-23

[00:05:33]Welcome back to Starship Flight 12 the first test flight of Starship version three As Dan mentioned earlier we were able to make contact with the modified satellites just shortly after deployment and as you may have seen we got some sweet views of those sats looking back at the ship Pretty cool to see Yeah those views were incredible Now as you see on your 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 Yeah that's right And re-entry is a critical phase of flight and we need information on how the ship's 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 pounds 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 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 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 eight kilometers per second Uh or for those of us that think in other units roughly five miles per second At those speeds the spacecraft is moving through the atmosphere and it creates that plasma field that we saw uh forming around the vehicle 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 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 h with the propulsive landing instead of a more traditional means like parachutes Propulsive landing not only again is it more cool but it enables a rapid uh a more rapidly reusable uh rocket Yeah Now we should hear some call-outs as the ship makes its way back to Earth 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 its as it returns So if we make it through those we're doing pretty well Yeah And you can see in the bottom left right now we're at 23 500 kilometers per hour uh speed That's just a crazy number to think about Um but as we keep progressing the mission we are gonna hear a call-out when the ship is transonic and then subsonic So transonic refe refers to the period of flight where the velocities of air flows 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 And after we hear the call-out that Starship is transonic we should hear the call-out when Starship is subsonic 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 Well 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 I can't remember exactly what the name is but the ones that see in billions of colors This is the closest I feel to being one of those 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 Yeah So pretty crazy we went all the way from Texas to the Indian Ocean in less than an hour Yeah She flies pretty fast that is for sure She flies very fast 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 gonna be the spiciest of entry today As a reminder we are gonna be doing uh some stress work on the ship where we're going to do a maneuver where we kind of uh kick the nose up to fully deploy those aft 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 2 We're gonna try and do that today Uh since we did skip the in-space burn we're carrying a little bit of extra propellant in our header tanks up in the nose And so that's gonna 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 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 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 the ship was still able to make it Uh but right now we're we're really gonna be testing the structural strength of these flaps on the way in and we're This is a flight test We're trying to intentionally find where our limits are 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 Yeah and as we're going down through the atmosphere here we are at about Mach 16 1 so still extremely fast uh although we have you know scrubbed off a sustam a substantial amount of our speed already Altitude at a little less than 60 kilometers All right we're about eight minutes away from our targeted landing and splashdown time Again this is when the ship's gonna start really getting close to the rim Ship is approaching the end of the peak heating region Just heard the call-out Getting to the end of the peak heating so the the highest temperature sh the Starship's gonna see during its reentry 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 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 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 That'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 kinda operate at a high enough frequency to punch through and that is blue ocean and sunlight you're seeing just beyond the flaps So we are coming down into daylight Mm Hopefully splashing down in the next six minutes or so in the In in the Indian Ocean Uh we've we've still got a a couple maneuvers lined up where we're gonna be really stressing the flaps on the ship so Ship has passed through the peak heating region External temperatures are coming down Wow that is incredible news As Dan mentioned we were expecting this reentry 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 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 reentering the atmosphere Yeah and you can tell by the G meter down in the bottom right that we're starting to pick up a couple more Gs here So we're definitely entering the thicker part of the atmosphere where we're scrubbing off all that energy like Kate's saying All right just about five minutes or so to go We're coming up shortly on the the maneuver where we're gonna It's affectionately called the the flap slap where we're going to kinda pitch the nose up on the ship and you're gonna see those aft flaps the ones on the very bottom fully deploy Ship is at peak dynamic pressure And we're now at peak pressure Ship flap load test has started Looks like it's holding Again the intent of that was to put just a lot of extra stress on those aft 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 Starship Ship flap load test is complete and we're through that test There we go And we just did that test at Mach 7 ju just for reference there So we are still going incredibly fast All right We are just about three and a half 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 Nominally we plan for three but we're gonna give it a try with two Hopefully we've got some room 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 splashdown in the Indian Ocean 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 gonna be trying to bring the ship back to the launch site which is Yeah gonna be absolutely insane Absolutely But of course we wanna 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 Absolutely Dynamic pressure is coming down All right We heard there dynamic pressure coming down and I'd say we're in a pretty good bank right now 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 Starship is subsonic and is on target 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 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 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 kilometers executing what we call the belly flip maneuver Ah yes Serial Number 8 the first belly flop I remember it well Just some really amazing views of the Earth as the ship is coming back home Thanks Starlink Yeah you can see the aft flap there making minor corrections Starship is turning for final approach to landing site Look at that turn There we go Minor corrections and a full turn Yeah Starship doesn't fly like an airplane It's a lot more like a skydiver 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 Again going for a landing burn trying to light two of these Raptor sea level engines Passing Landing burn startup Landing burn startup Two ending flip Successful flip Buoy cam adjustment Starship is landed Heat shield down Oh Amazing That ball of fire is exactly what we wanted to see for the ship today as weird as it may sound to