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Aug. 30, 2025 18:11-18:58 - CSPAN
46:55
SpaceX Starship Flight Test 10
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
The other half of the space station, we might have a lead for certain things, but everybody is doing all of the work all of the time.
So one hour you might be working on an electrical problem or a plumbing problem.
The next hour you're working on a scientific experiment.
It's really cool to get to share the work that way.
Wow, Eagle Nation, that was awesome.
Hi, my name is Dave Limball and I'm one of the STEM teachers here at Glen Oak High School.
On behalf of the students and the staff, we would like to extend our appreciation to all the members of NASA and our new friends flying high in the skies above us.
Thank you for inspiring us to reach for the stars.
Go Eagles.
Thank you all for the really great questions.
We loved answering these.
Go Eagles.
Station, this is Houston ACR.
Thank you.
That concludes our event.
SpaceX has tested the launch of its Starship spacecraft from South Texas.
During the flight, Starship successfully deployed the first mock Starlink satellites and landed in the Indian Ocean.
This part of the launch is about 45 minutes.
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, that 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.
This is 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-minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
We have lipped it.
Booster chamber pressure nominal. 30 seconds into flight.
33 at Wood Rapporteur.
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. 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.
Ship ignition.
Boost back burn, start up.
stage separation.
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 are seeing all six raptors lit up on ship.
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 there.
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, they're 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.
not the first payload we've ever carried but it's the first one we're going to 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 And you're seeing a little bit of residual gas.
And we opened 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.
Chip has transitioned to payload deploy.
Here 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, it's 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 it's good on payload deployed.
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 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 emulators 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 Indian Ocean.
So the last one has been deployed.
Starlink simulator payload complete.
Heck yeah, everybody.
Lending the energy from Starbase at Hawthorne.
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.
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.
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 flashdown.
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 can say we're doing pretty well.
I will say I'm happy reentry 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.
Is that 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 reentry, 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 six flight desks 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.
I mean, 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 design 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.
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 we're putting ship through the wringer on this flight in it's like we're still maintaining control
All right, flaps earning their paycheck today, getting through kind of that max dressing.
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 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 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 smoothed 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 on that.
So it looks like that's been pretty successful.
So, all right, we are less than a minute away 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 watched some of 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.
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.
All right, 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.
Farewell, Ship 37.
Thank you, Bowie Cam.
Landing flip, landing, burn, splash down in the Indian Ocean.
There we go.
All right.
That was pretty awesome.
Incredible flight today 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 Hawthorne.
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 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, this 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 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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