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Aug. 26, 2025 19:24-20:43 - CSPAN
01:18:58
SpaceX Starship Flight Test 10
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Kirkpatrick's, that's his grave there.
He also participated in the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, and George Washington sent him a case of wine to say thanks.
That's one remaining wine bottle.
And then last slide here.
Kirkpatrick's captain from the beginning was William Cron, who we talked about.
That's him on the right.
On the left is his wife Lucy, who was the sister of 8th Virginia Captain Jonathan Clark, George Rogers Clark, who was George Slaughter's commander in the West, and the older sister of William Clark, better known as Lewis and Clark.
So quite a family.
Cron was in charge of distributing Bountyland to veterans in Kentucky, and he became wealthy.
And if you are a member of the society, you may recognize the ribbon that he's wearing there.
That is his Society of the Cincinnati medallion.
That's what I've got for you.
Here's the reenactor group.
You can learn more at this website and my new website, which is here.
That's what I have for you all.
Do we have still time for Q ⁇ A, Andrew?
We're going to leave this discussion to take you live to South Texas for a test flight of the SpaceX Starship after yesterday's test was scrapped because of problems with the ground systems.
The rescheduled launch, expected to happen in just a few minutes, with staff broadcasting the details on the ground.
You're watching live coverage here on C-SPAN.
That's super exciting.
And yeah, come check us out.
All right.
Absolutely.
It's surreal to be here for sure.
Okay, so we are looking like we're about five minutes away from launch and heading into terminal count.
Range and weather are continuing to look good and prop load continues on both stages of Starship.
We'll close out here in just a minute or so.
Yeah, we're just about done.
It looks like, let me grab my numbers real quick.
We're not tracking any issues.
We are just creeping up to 90% full on the locks on the booster, a little over 93% on ship, or sorry, fuel on the booster.
And then ship, we're just about to close out.
So only a couple of minutes to go there.
Once we're done, you've got just shy of 11 million pounds of liquid propellant on board those two different stages.
We'll see a couple of final things happen.
You can't really see it.
It's all going to be happening in our ground systems as we'll do pushbacks, clear all of the propellant out of those lines that are flowing up through the tower and into the vehicles and get ready for launch.
We just did our final guidance navigation and control system checkouts.
Our flight safety system is being armed right now and we're doing our final wiggle checks shortly with the engines on the thrust vector control.
It's how we're steering the rocket.
If we need to hold, which we are not currently tracking a reason to hold, that would come at T minus 40 seconds.
You saw us do that yesterday.
We can hang out there for about eight minutes or so right now.
That's the point it's built into the countdown.
If we need to wait for clouds that just won't go the heck away or any other issues, we can hang out at T minus 40 for a bit.
But at the moment, we're not planning to do that.
Now, once we pass that T minus 40 second mark, a number of events are going to occur in rapid succession.
The ground spin and ignition systems come up to flight pressure.
Ship will switch over to internal power.
And after that, the QD arm lockout is removed in preparation for retraction, which occurs shortly after T0.
And once we pass that T minus 40 seconds, we do still have the ability to then recycle the count under certain conditions back to T minus 40 seconds and hold there to assess what happened.
And if we can proceed again back down to liftoff.
That's right.
We do have at least one point of no return, though, if the water-cooled flame deflector underneath the launch mount fires off.
happens a little bit after T minus 10 seconds.
That doesn't turn off once it starts going.
So we would have to stand down for the day if we do hit a hold or an abort at that point so we can refill water tanks.
At this point, we're not sure if we'd be able to attempt tomorrow because we have fully loaded the vehicle.
We have to do a lot of fancy scheduling to get propellant in here as fast as possible.
But again, we've got a pretty heroic and amazing team that works all of those logistics.
Got us into our attempt today after we did an unplanned wet dress yesterday during our attempt.
So really exciting to see.
But we're coming up on two minutes.
We've got a green range.
We are green for weather.
Green has always been my favorite color, only more so now.
And we are not tracking any issues with the vehicle today.
So we are looking good.
Two minutes to go.
Yeah, again, not planning on holding at T minus 40 seconds right now, but in case we do pass that and any issues come up, we can recycle the count.
We're pretty lucky that we have this ability.
Falcon doesn't have that built in, but being a developmental program, this affords us a lot more flexibility.
So super useful to be able to have that.
But again, not currently tracking any issues.
So hopefully we'll be good to launch today.
All right, coming up on 90 seconds, we've got a pretty good crowd gathering with us right outside Star Factory here at Starbase.
Looks like we're getting a quick TVC, that wiggle check.
It's my favorite view of the rocket.
Right under the launch mount.
All right, so we've got crowds gathered out in Hawthorne, crowds gathered here at Starbase.
Super fun to see people getting to watch out on the front lawn now.
One minute to go to launch.
All right, so again, our hold point comes up at T minus 40, not tracking any reason to stop there.
So we should see us go right through that.
All right, we are through T minus 40.
We are counting down.
We're going to let our flight director, Machak Batura, take us the rest of the way.
30 seconds, the 10th liftoff of Starship.
T-15.
T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
We have looked at it.
Vehicle's pitching sound range.
Booster chamber pressure nominal.
All right, we're a little over 40 seconds into flight.
33 out of 33.
Power and telemetry nominal.
Getting good call-outs.
Healthy systems on the booster as it starts to pitch over over the gulf.
All right, we're a little over one minute into flight about to pack through Max Q. Max Q. All right, so we are through the period of maximum dynamic pressure, max stress on the vehicle as it continues to fly.
Our next major event is going to be hot staging, which is happening in just over 90 seconds from now.
To get ready, the booster will shut down all but three of its Raptor engines.
The clamps holding the two stages together will release, and the Starship second stage ignites its engines.
The ship then separates from the super heavy booster and heads to space.
At the same time, the three engines still firing on super heavy will flip the booster around.
Ten more engines will ignite for the boost back burn, putting the first stage on the path for splashdown in the Gulf.
As we mentioned earlier, the hot stage will be jettisoned for this flight, and that should occur just after the boost back burn.
So, we're about to shut down the first stage and perform hot staging.
So let's just watch and listen.
All right, seeing the engine start to throttle down.
Miko.
ignition.
Stage separation confirmed.
We've got six engines running on ship.
Booster is doing its boost back burn, continuing now towards its splashdown site in the Gulf.
We have seen all six raptors lit up on ship.
You heard them report ship chamber pressures nominal, so that chamber pressure, just that expected thrust level in those raptor engines on the ship.
Three vacuum-optimized, three sea level, all looking good.
There's a view into the business end from the ship.
Two-spec burn shutdown.
All right, so at this point, we finished our boost back burn.
So that was shut down.
So that's the first of the two burns after a launch that the booster is going to do today.
So now it's headed towards the Gulf.
It's not going to be quite as an aggressive of a flight down.
We relax that angle of attack a little bit, but we are then going to be looking for it to do its engine tests for the landing burn.
And those are going to be a little unique this time.
Yeah, typically we start with all 13 inner engines lit for that landing burn and bring that down to just the center three.
But one of our test objectives for today is to simulate what an engine out situation would look like.
So we're going to be intentionally turning off one of those center three and instead lighting one of the engines from the middle 10 ring.
Yeah, we did see one of those engines in the middle ring shut down during the initial asset.
Oh, looks like we have hot stage jettison.
You can see it floating away there to the left of the booster.
Yeah, we did see one of those middle engines shut down during the ascent.
Again, we are resilient to engine out on Super Heavy.
Able to get through our ascent starship flying on the expected path.
There's still a chance that engine could be back in the mix for the very start of the landing burn.
So we'll see if we light up all 13, but we've I mean we've even done a landing burn at the tower with an engine out, so very resilient.
We'll see how it does on its way down to the Gulf, though.
All right, so we've got a couple of minutes.
That landing burn start should be just about 40 seconds away.
That's always rad.
Could see the boost plume itself in the background as it was coming in.
All right, about 20 seconds to landing burn.
Ship rapture chamber pressure is nominal.
All right, here we go.
Landing burn startup.
Looks like we got 12 of those 13 down to three, including one in the middle ring, down to two nice little hover and landing burn shut down and into the Gulf.
Here we come, and the booster has splashed down.
Incredible flight for booster today.
Meanwhile, back in space, about seven minutes into today's flight, ship continuing its ascent burn.
This goes until just about nine minutes into our flight.
That ship engine cutoff is slated for eight minutes and 57 seconds.
We are going to see those three Rvac, the Raptor vacuum engines.
Those are the bigger circles in that little indicator on the bottom right of your screen.
Those will shut down first and we continue burning for a couple seconds longer on those inner three before we hit seco or second engine cutoff.
yeah these views are looking great once again thanks to starlink for for getting us these views it's just incredible and we just heard the sound from booster it's like we just we just got a the late boom from the booster
Yeah, we have ship engine cutoff coming up here just shortly, and as we mentioned, today's flight test is not an orbital flight, but rather one that demonstrates Starship's orbital capability.
all right entering the final phase of this burn under 30 seconds to go all right shut down the vacuum engines
Ship engine cut off.
We shut down those center three.
successful ship engine cutoff.
Seaco, baby.
There we go.
That's what we want.
Phenomenal orbit insertion.
All right.
We just heard the call-out for a nominal orbital insertion.
All right, so ship is in space.
There we go.
We're seeing the flap starting to move into a stowed position.
That's why it looks like your camera's moving.
Yeah, exciting to see Starship safely in space and super pumped to see all the team's hard work in action here today.
And of course, as guaranteed, it's been an exciting day so far.
We successfully lifted off right on time at 6.30 p.m. Central Time.
Thankfully, our weather was looking good today.
Yeah, and booster, we had our soft splashdown in the Gulf, so ship continues on.
Yeah, ship able to complete its ascent burn all the way.
And you can see some of the shadows start to creep as it's going to be eventually flying into an orbital nighttime.
So we'll see some daylight start to go away.
But ship is in orbit, completed its burn, and I mean, that's just the beginning.
Now we've got a whole bunch more to go.
So we've got some exciting demonstrations planned while we're on orbit.
So that right there, we just saved the FTS, the flight termination system.
That's that automatic flight safety system we have on the vehicle.
So that is now turned off while ship starts its coast period.
We are coming up.
Our next milestone is going to be the deployment of those Starlink simulators.
We've got some payload inside of Starship that we're hoping to deploy into space for the very first time.
That deploy is supposed to start at about 18 minutes and 27 seconds into the flight.
So just about seven minutes from now.
That deploy will take place over a couple of minutes.
It'll go about one satellite a minute.
So we'll be spread out over that.
It might get a little dark, but we've got a couple of views that we can show you to see that deploy in action.
After that, we're also looking to do a relight of a single Raptor engine while we are in space.
We've done this once before.
This is not necessary to de-orbit as we are in a suborbital trajectory, but this is essentially a chance to test out what we need to be able to do a de-orbit burn.
So we'll be doing that a little bit later in the flight, about 37 minutes or so into the flight.
And then we get into re-entry.
We're looking to get that light show and more importantly, get that really critical data about the ship's heat shield.
Yeah, exactly.
At about T plus 45 minutes, we'll be heading for re-entry.
Again, running those experiments with the tiles.
We're going to be doing missing tiles, metallic tiles, and also intentionally loading Those vehicles flaps.
Hopefully, we'll also see a splashdown in the Indian Ocean today.
Yeah, we were able to get to a re-entry last time, but we didn't have full attitude control, so we weren't able to go in, you know, heat shield first the way we're designed to.
So, we ended up losing contact with the ship before we could make it all the way through.
So, you still get data, but you're not really getting the data that we want to make sure we're kind of stress testing the vehicle.
As Amanda just said, we removed a bunch of tiles, and we do this in some intentionally scary places on the vehicle because we're really looking: are there spots that were vulnerable to this before we ever start moving towards putting the ship into a full orbital mission to then do re-entries a little bit later on?
So, really, really critical to get that data.
Really looking forward to a controlled reentry.
Yeah, for sure.
As we always say, our main payload is data.
But today, we also have some actual payload on board, and those simulators that Starship will be deploying.
We'll see coming up here in just a few minutes.
These are dummy satellites that are about the same size as our V3 Starlinks.
We have eight in the Starship Pez dispenser and expect to deploy at a rate of about one per minute, as Dan mentioned earlier.
Starlink is critical in all of our flights on Starship to get our main payload data, as we always say.
And in fact, it's Starlink that's currently providing these views you see as Starship cruises a couple hundred kilometers above our home planet and provides real-time telemetry through every phase of flight.
Yeah, we took a peek inside of the Starship payload bay there for a second.
So, there's eight of them.
They kind of look just big steel plates, essentially.
They're roughly the same size as those V3 satellites.
When we do get that view inside of the payload bay, the payload door will kind of be on your right, and we'll start to see them go out like a PES dispenser.
Yeah, here's a look inside.
So, those right down there in the center, there are kind of two stacks of four on either side, and then the payload door is just to their right, and so we'll look to see that open, and then those satellites start to go.
We actually vent the nose cone, so we essentially bring it down to vacuum before we open the door.
That was one of the things we ran into on the last flight.
As when we had that fuel diffuser fail, the pressure in the nose cone became basically too high for the actuator of the door to open.
So, that's why we weren't able to get the door open that time.
We have not seen anything like that on this flight.
Everything's looking good with our fuel tank and our fuel press system.
So, we are hopefully just a couple of minutes away from seeing that payload door open and getting to our first ever payload.
That's not the first payload we've ever carried, but it's the first one we're gonna try and shoot off into space.
All right, so I think we're supposed to open the payload door in just about a minute and change.
And you're seeing a little bit of residual gas, and we open the door once.
I want to say it was back on flight three when we were able to make it up into space.
And you'll kind of see a lot of that gas rushing out into the vacuum of space.
It's the residual that's left over after we've already vented it down.
So kind of a cool light show, and then we'll get ready to deploy those payloads out.
And as we mentioned, so we have crossed over now at this point into an orbital nighttime.
So views from the outside will get pretty dark.
But we'll see what we can see.
We do this, we do this by design.
We've been launching these later in the day here in Texas to try and get daytime views when we splash down.
So it's daytime over in the Indian Ocean where we are currently headed.
Just a few seconds until we expect those payload doors to open.
All right, one more time.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
So we are currently in payload deploy prep.
and the door is open.
All right, so the payload door is open.
We should see the first satellite start to deploy at about T plus 18 minutes and 27 seconds.
So should be only about 30 seconds.
So one step closer.
Hal listened this time.
He cooperated.
He opened the payload door for us.
There's a view kind of behind the Pez here looking out into the vacuum of space.
About 15 seconds until payload deploy.
Ship has transitioned to payload deploy.
There we go, QPU, been waiting way too long to do that.
there we go.
There goes another one.
Super exciting moment as you can hear the energy in both Hawthorne and Starbase.
Everyone's super excited for finally getting to deploy some of those simulated satellites.
Pez system moving down, next bro.
There we go.
As we said, we're going to do about one every minute or so.
And this is just kind of a dress rehearsal for when we're going to be deploying the V3 satellites.
And these are just a massive, massive increase to Starlink's capability.
Each one of them has 60 terabits per second of capacity that's going to get added to the network per launch.
That's 20 times more than what we're adding with every single Falcon 9 launch today, which, you know, step increase in capability.
There goes another one.
All right, so as we said, we've got eight total that we're going to go through today.
It's about a minute for each one, but looking good on payload deploy.
All right,
so we're about halfway through.
When we actually start launching the V3 Starlinks on Starship, we're going to be flying about 60 each time.
So it'll be about an hour to get through a full stack.
But again, it's just going to be a massive increase in the amount of bandwidth.
It's going to enable gigabit upload download for people with Starlink, you know, anywhere on the planet.
And for us, Starlink is just a tremendous part of just the Starship flight test program.
Yeah, absolutely.
Always getting us that data.
And yeah, the amazing views we have on the vehicle today.
Yeah, views brought to you by Starlink of us deploying Starlink simulators before we deploy actual Starlinks.
How deep does it go?
All right, another one firing out.
Pez looking smooth today.
All right, looks like we've got one left.
Almost there.
Yeah, there you go.
One remaining.
So seven of the eight have been deployed, one more to go.
And then we will have completed our first ever payload deploy operation.
Just a reminder, we're on a suborbital trajectory.
These satellites on that exact same suborbital trajectory, they're going to burn up entirely.
They're on that same trajectory towards the end of the Earth.
So the last one has been deployed.
Starlink simulator payload complete.
Heck yeah, everybody.
Loving the energy from Starbase in Hall Thorne.
There, yeah, now it's empty.
Looking a little lonely, but.
Successfully deployed all the simulated satellites.
Really, really cool to see them all out there.
Again, people that have followed know Starlink's really critical for the Starship program, in addition to getting all those views back from the cameras on Starship, which this is an external view.
As I said, it's dark outside right now.
The lights are off.
So it's going to be hard to make stuff out.
But in a little while, the sun's going to start coming up as we get to re-entry, which is going to be really critical.
I mean, we use Starlink for Starship data.
Cameras also use it on the cameras that we use to bring you views of these launches and also hopefully of the re-entry and splashdown.
We'll see what we get from the Indian Ocean today.
And that's just kind of how it all comes together.
Like, we're using Starlink on the planet, off the planet.
With Starship, we actually get pretty insane.
If you're in the space industry, you know, bandwidth to space is usually pretty minimal.
We get about 120 megabits per second.
That's split between our high-definition video and real-time telemetry.
We get that every phase of flight, including re-entry.
So it's not just giving us views of re-entry, but we're getting all of that engineering data in real time through phases that it used to be impossible to get that in real time.
So just really incredible.
Yeah, Starlink definitely affords us all this capability.
And reminder, it's the world's largest satellite constellation operating in low-Earth orbit to deliver high-speed, low-latency broadband internet.
This provides internet access to people all around the world, many of whom had never had connectivity before.
Today, Starlink serves more than 150 countries, territories, and other markets with over 6 million active customers and counting.
To meet the growing global demand for high-speed internet, SpaceX expanded its factory in Bastrop, Texas, and also introduced Starlink Mini, as well as an upgraded version of the Starlink standard kit.
All right, now with payload deploy complete, PPPU Starship is now going to close its payload bay door and continue to coast towards Earth, around Earth, towards the Indian Ocean.
Sorry, I'm really excited today.
We are in space, people.
Still a lot of major events to come, though.
We are looking to relight one of those Raptor engines at about 37 minutes, 33 seconds into the flight, followed by atmospheric entry, hell of a light show, and splashdown.
So we're going to go on a quick break, take a quick coast, sit back, enjoy the views.
A little bit dark now, but they'll get better soon.
A couple of space jams.
We'll be back in just a few minutes for that Raptor relight and then re-entry.
you soon.
If you're just joining us, Starship just successfully deployed its first ever payload.
We got eight of those Starlink simulators out, and now we are expecting the relight of a single Raptor engine that should be coming up in just a little under a minute.
We're going to be lighting just one of those Raptor C-levels in the middle there.
This is not a deorbit burn, it's a demonstration of what we'll have to do for de-orbit burns.
But we've done this once before.
This is something we're really going to have to do when we're doing orbital missions.
So, it's a pretty critical test.
We are just a couple seconds away.
Sorry, we're about 20 seconds away.
So, we got a little bit more time.
So, we are going to see one of those Raptor engines light back up.
We are through the deorbit demo gate, so we should be seeing it momentarily.
Relight demo startup and shutdown.
All right, looks like we confirmed the relight of one of those center raptor engines.
Second time we've done that.
Super exciting.
Huge congrats to the team on this milestone.
Very exciting to see.
That was a cool light show.
Yeah, I get to do a mini version here.
So, again, that's going to be really critical for when we're doing deorbit burns.
Like, as you're going through, which if you don't have one of these, my God, they're so much fun.
But, like, you're able to actually light.
Oh, man, Dan, turn it on, light that engine, not set my co-host on fire.
And that's what we'll eventually do to you know, break out of orbit, come back down to Earth.
So, really cool to see one of those engines light back up again in space.
That was our last in-space thing.
Very exciting.
We're going to be heading back for re-entry at about T plus 45 minutes.
We're going to take another quick break, and we will see you soon.
Starship is approaching entry interface.
All right, so we are back.
We are about 45 minutes into the 10th flight test of Starship.
And as you can see, the light show has started.
Re-entry has begun.
We are starting to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.
We're moving about five times the speed of sound, and we're about to start barreling through the Earth's atmosphere and head for a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
We don't plan to recover the spacecraft today, but if we do make it all the way down to the water, who knows?
But the goal of this part of the flight is to learn as much as we can about the ship's heat shield.
A fully reusable, rapidly reusable heat shield for a spacecraft has never been done before.
It's one of the hardest engineering challenges still out there for us.
And so, this is a time to really dig in and get that data.
Yeah, absolutely.
And re-entry is a critical phase of flight.
So, we'll need information on how the ship's system ends up performing.
And Starlink will also help us gather as much data as possible, which is really the main reason why we do these flight tests.
Starlink provides us with one more path to collect data to help us rapidly iterate on Starship's design.
And if the ship manages to make it all the way to re-entry, we'll collect valuable data on the spacecraft flying through the Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds or more than five times the speed of sound.
Yeah, throughout history, a lot of times this is when you go into just a complete data and insight blackout, where that plasma sheath builds up around the outside of the spacecraft that blocks all of your signals that are trying to fight through to talk to either satellites out in space or towers down on the ground.
Starship's big size kind of gives us awake, but what really helps us punch through is the fact that we're using Starlink.
We're operating at just a much higher frequency.
That's not what we want to see.
So, we started, we just saw some of the aft skirt just take a hit.
So, we've got some visible damage on the aft skirt.
We're continuing to re-enter, though.
And again, we are intentionally stressing the ship as we go through this.
So, it is not guaranteed to be a smooth ride down to the Indian Ocean.
We've removed a bunch of tiles in kind of critical places across the vehicle.
So, seeing stuff like that is still valuable to us.
We are trying to kind of push this vehicle to the limits to learn what its limits are as we design our next version of Starship.
So, 47 minutes, 45 seconds into the flight, excitement ticking up a little bit on re-entry already, but the light show is continuing.
This re-entry is going to take about 20 minutes or so until our plans flash down.
We are trying to splash down about one hour and six minutes into the flight.
Yeah, and one day, Starship is designed to land on Mars where there are obviously no runways or other humans to help us out.
So, we are doing propulsive landing instead of more traditional means, such as parachutes.
And propulsive landing enables us to have more rapid reusability with these vehicles.
Yeah, the ship itself, it's a little over 50 meters tall.
We've got those six engines on board, the three vacuum, the three sea level, and they're down in that abscurt region.
Flaps have control.
All right, so at this point, the flaps have control.
That means we're getting into a dense enough part of the atmosphere that the flaps can start controlling us.
We're not only reliant on those kind of reaction control system thrusters.
We're going to continue hearing some call-outs as the ship makes its way back to Earth.
So, when we hear entry-max heating and entry-max Q, that will mean the ship has made it through the maximum heating and aerodynamic loads it will experience as it returns.
So, if it makes it through those, we could say we're doing pretty well.
I will say I'm happy re-entry cleaned off this camera for us.
It was a little dirty from the weather.
So thank you, Plasma, for giving us this view as we start coming down.
The hit we saw to the skirt, definitely interesting.
I will note when we started doing these missing tile tests, we were intentionally removing them only in the skirt.
As that's you know, it that's not over your fuel tanks or anything else that's kind of structurally critical for keeping the entire vehicle together.
That obviously exposes your engines.
So that could do some things for our landing burn.
But for now, we are obviously continuing with this re-entry.
We are committed.
Indian Ocean, here we come.
50 minutes since launch.
We're going to see those colors start to build up a little bit.
We are at the point where we're in dense enough atmosphere that the flaps have control.
It's about 74 kilometers in altitude.
And you were starting to see some sunlight.
So we intentionally time these launches right now so we have daylight.
The sun should actually come up over the horizon on Starship in about three minutes.
So as we get a little bit further into this re-entry, that inky black below you is going to start to look like clouds and hopefully a bright blue ocean as we make our way down onto the other side of the planet.
We've got these cameras.
These cameras are really cool.
We added these several flights ago looking directly at the flaps as not just the heat shield but these flaps, how they're able to control the vehicle, withstand that re-entry, the seal locations, so kind of where they connect to the ship itself are some of the most critical.
We will do missing tiles on those where again we're trying to be mean to this starship a little bit.
We're really trying to put it through the paces and kind of poke on what some of its weak points are.
I mean we even have missing tiles over some of those fuel tank sections of the ship itself.
And so we're really trying to see what are our limits.
We're doing this over a completely empty area over the Earth.
Look at our raptors there.
We are assuming we make it all the way down to the ocean in one piece.
We will attempt a flip and a landing burn.
We do have at least one buoy, everybody's favorite camera person out in the Indian Ocean right now being powered by Starlink.
So that's at our planned landing location.
So if we're able to get any live views of the ship, that'll essentially tell you that we nailed our target.
able to do that on our sixth flight desk, do it in the daytime, which was really exciting.
All right, so we're about 10 minutes until we're probably going to start hearing some of the other big milestones coming up.
Yep, in about 10 minutes, like Dan said, Starship will be transonic.
This is going to be the period of flight where the velocities of airflow surrounding and flowing past the vehicle are concurrently below, at, and above the speed of sound.
So somewhere in the range of Mach 0.8 to 1.2.
For reference, commercial jets have a range of cruising speeds, but most of them fly at speeds between Mach 0.74 and Mach 0.85.
So that's 480 to 575 miles per hour or 770 to 930 kilometers per hour.
And after transonic comes subsonic, that just means you're slower than the speed of sound.
We're still well in excess of that right now.
But by the time we hit subsonic, we're essentially belly flopping down.
There we go.
There's that sunlight.
So we're seeing the Earth now come back into view.
One of the other things we're doing during this, and you're going to see Starship kind of pitch in some pretty, not extreme ways, but a little extreme, as we're trying to really stress the structure of the ship itself, specifically those aft flaps.
So the ones in the very bottom of the vehicle.
We're pushing not just how well does the heat shield hold up, but how well does the ship structure hold up.
We are pushing it beyond essentially what we think we'll have to fly at to do something like a return to launch site.
So again, may not be a very smooth ride downhill, but we're doing that by design.
We're really trying to find what are the edges that we can operate at, build up a good data set.
But sun is up, clouds and water down below us.
We are just about 10 minutes away, a little less than 10 minutes now, until we start hitting transonic and then subsonic.
Once we hit subsonic, we're basically just belly flopping.
All right, so about 55 and a half minutes in, you can see the sun is up.
Again, we intentionally designed these flights to lift off in the evening here so we get these daylight views so we can get as good a video as possible on the ship assuming we make it all the way down.
We've got at least one buoy powered by Starlink that's out there in the landing zone in the Indian Ocean and hopefully giving us a view again.
If you see any live views not from the ship itself, that means we nailed our landing target.
All right, we just heard the call out that we're past peak heating, so things are looking good so far.
good and at this point again the flaps are controlling so this movement you're seeing is that forward flap moving to try and just maintain maintain control maintain attitude of the vehicle as we're coming down
Checking in on one of our flaps.
We got one of these cameras on all four of the flaps, two in the front, two in the back, giving us really good close-up views.
As we're we obviously don't have a camera that can see the entire heat shield.
These give us kind of the best that we can do.
But looking at those flaps is really those are just super critical for controlling the ship.
You have some ability to maneuver kind of cross-range.
So as you're coming in, you can see in that indicator at the very bottom right that we've pitched up quite a bit.
So again, we are maximally stressing those aft flaps right now.
Looks like we got a little bit of burn through the very bottom part of it.
Everything's still looking good.
at maintaining control.
We should be just about five minutes away until we hear that we're transonic.
Still a little bit toasty on the aft skirt of the vehicle as we continue coming in.
Again, we are intentionally stressing the flaps so we can learn all we can.
All right, so now we're already well past peak heating.
Just about 48, 49, counting down to 48 kilometers in altitude.
Expecting that transonic to come.
So transitioning between the speed of sound and subsonics lower than the speed of sound in just a little under four minutes from now.
And right now we've got kind of a lot of forward momentum, a lot of forward velocity.
And then eventually by the time we hit subsonic.
All right, here we go.
So this is what we've been talking about where we are going to essentially try to fully deploy those aft flaps and really stress them out.
So again, this is meant to test the extremes for the vehicle.
See those flaps swinging out.
Again, we are putting ship through the wringer on this flight end.
It's like we're still maintaining control.
All right, flaps earning their paycheck today, getting through kind of that max stress and Definitely things looking good so far.
We're about two minutes out now from Starship becoming Transonic.
One cool thing to note as we get some of those views showing kind of the the whole length of the ship.
One of the changes we made after flight six was to change the tile line a little bit.
So we had kind of scaled back the number of tiles significantly, as when we go to catch these ships you don't want to I think, as Elon said you don't want to shuck the the ship as you catch it and knock all those tiles off.
So we knew we were going to have to kind of peel back that layer a little bit.
And the first time we did it was on flight six and we saw kind of wrinkling and dimples almost in the ship as we were creating these hot spots in the uneven parts of the heat shield, and so we to kind of address that.
We smoothed it out.
That's why you've got kind of that nice smooth out black line now on the ship and just looking at it we can see kind of a little bit of hot spot, a little bit of warping.
Almost near the payload door you can see a little bit of colored patina up above it, but we don't see those kind of deep almost.
You know they almost look like gouges uh on that.
So it looks like that's.
That's been pretty successful.
So, all right, we are less than a minute away from from hitting transonic again.
Pretty soon, our kind of our forward velocity is going to look like it's kind of falling off a cliff and starship will look like it's falling off a cliff as we essentially go into our belly flop.
If you watch some of the the high altitude tests or suborbital campaigns, we were able to test that.
That was a pretty fundamental like, can this thing actually fly?
And we were able to prove that out with that suborbital campaign.
And that's what we're about to see shortly here.
All right.
So at this point, we've dropped below the speed of sound.
So Starship itself is subsonic.
We are starting to chill the engines for a landing burn attempt, landing flip, supposed to start in a little over two minutes.
Subsonic Indian Ocean.
We're on our way.
Starship is subsonic.
There we go.
Farewell space.
So coming up in just a little under two minutes.
So we're going to do the flip and the burn.
So we're only using those three center Raptor engines, the sea levels, the ones that can kind of gimbal, that can move around and steer, dipping the nose down a little bit.
Got two of our engines chilled in waiting on one more So, again, we'll attempt to use three burns for that initial flip.
We eventually go down to just two Raptors for the end of the landing burn.
Just about one minute now from that landing flip and landing burn start.
Structurally, we're looking good.
Got good pressures in our nose cone for everything.
Just about 30 seconds.
So, yeah, we're going to look for the flip.
So, Starship's doing its belly flop right now.
We're going to do the flip.
Swing out.
Let's punch through some clouds first.
Here we go.
Starship landing burn startup.
Seeing three engines.
There's our flip.
There's a buoy.
There's a splashdown Oh, man.
Yeah, farewell, ship 37.
Thank you, Bowie Cam.
Landing flip, landing, burn, splash out in the Indian Ocean.
There we go.
All right.
That was pretty awesome.
Incredible flight for both ship and booster.
Yeah, really incredible.
So obviously, we're excited here.
It looks like everybody's excited over there.
Tyler, how's it going over in Hawthorne?
We are super excited to hear Nawthorne.
It was another exciting Starship flight test in the books, and we hope you enjoyed those Starlink views.
So congratulations to the team at Starbase and everyone here and around the company.
So many employees have contributed enormously to the Starship program as we continue to iterate and make progress towards a multi-planetary future.
So that's going to wrap it up for us here in Hawthorne.
Thank you to everyone for tuning in today.
It was great being with you today.
Back to you guys.
That was absolutely incredible.
Huge congrats to all the teams here.
Again, we lifted off from Starbase, Texas right at the top of our window at 6:30 p.m. Central Time.
We saw a booster successfully lift us up through ascent, had a successful hot staging where ship continued on with its suborbital trajectory.
Booster came back down, had that boost back burn, and a successful landing burn with that unique engine configuration as well.
And then ship continued on its way, made it all the way into space.
We got to see first ever payload deploy.
So excited.
That was awesome.
We got the door open, eight Starlink simulators deployed, relit that Raptor engine, and then on entry, we probably gave it a little bit of extra time in the oven, but made it all the way through re-entry.
All three engines started up, landing flip, splashed down in the Indian Ocean.
Promised maximum excitement.
Starship delivered.
Definitely.
Congratulations, all of our teammates here at SpaceX.
It's been a year.
Everybody that's worked on this program is what we're working for.
So big congrats to all of them.
Thank you to all of our future customers too for your support.
And we'd also like to thank the fine people of Cameron County, including the residents of its newest city, Starbase, as well as the Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Government of Mexico, and the Australian Space Agency.
Be sure to stay tuned to SpaceX on X for updates, more of the views.
This is just a tiny amount of the views.
We have so many views that we didn't get to feature on the broadcast.
So we're going to be going through that over the next couple of days and we'll be posting it all there.
Yeah, if you're interested in more launch coverage, head on over to spacex.com/slash launches for the most up-to-date information.
In fact, we actually recently rolled out a new departure board featuring our upcoming launches with details like mission name, launch and landing site, and liftoff time.
So be sure to check it out.
All right.
We just launched the world's biggest rocket.
Again, dropped a couple satellites off, suborbital.
Incredible payload deploy for today.
Nailed that double header into the ocean, splashdown.
Time to go through the data.
Really crazy cool to hit all those objectives today.
Yeah, huge shout out to all the teams who make this look easy.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in.
And we will see you back here for flight 11.
Good night.
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