BAD NEWS! Starship Flight 9 Booster 14 RUD on Landing, S35 Lost...Here's What Happened!

6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. T-plus 40 seconds. It's one hell of a sight from here. We see it arcing right over top of us. We see 33 out of 33 Raptor engines lit on Super Heavy as it starts to ascend skyward. Coming up on maximum aerodynamic pressure. Then only about a minute and a half until we get into hot staging. Wow, Dan, that was incredible. We could feel the building shaking here. Feel the vehicle's power. And we're just about a minute away from shutting down those engines on the booster. Again, this booster is flying for its second time today. All right, so hot staging coming up a little under a minute. We're going to see all but the three center engines turn off on the booster. So our version of MECO, most engines cut off. And then just a few seconds later, hoping to see six engines ignite on ship to push it away. All right, hot staging, about 30 seconds. And definitely keep an eye on which way the booster flips. First ever directional flip we're going for today should flip straight up. See those engines powering down. Booster engine cut off. Ship ignition. Stage separation. Incredible flip by Super Heavy booster. And you can see those six engines, those three engines on the ship ignited. Six healthy Raptors running on ship on its way to space. Peek that engine view booster doing the boost back. Chris, how's it looking over there in Hawthorne, man? It is looking absolutely incredible here in Hawthorne. As we said, six healthy engines on ship. We've got 13 out of 13 engines on the booster. Now down to those three, which is what we expect in the final moments of the boost back burn. Now, as a reminder, we are not recovering the Super Heavy booster today. We are instead going to do some... And there we had a good shutdown of the boost back burn. Next up will be the jettison of that hot stage rig. Ship avionics power and telemetry nominal. Great call out there that everything looking nominal aboard the Super Heavy vehicle, which is returning to Earth, and we're going to be doing some experiments with it, including a higher angle of attack reentry, as well as some engine tests as it gets closer to the Gulf. We are, again, because of these tests not recovering it, we are sending it to the Gulf on purpose to do those tests. But, again, you see the booster on the left-hand side of your screen. You see ship with six healthy engines continuing its ascent to its planned suborbital trajectory. Everything going very well so far for Starship's ninth flight. Now four minutes, 15 seconds in. Great views from inside of the aft engine area of ship there, looking at those three sea level and three Raptor engines on the right-hand side of your screen. The booster doing its LOX dump, that liquid oxygen dump, so because we don't need some of that liquid oxygen propellant in its tanks, we vent that propellant out to lessen the booster's mass as it comes in for its landing. Just absolutely gorgeous views watching these two vehicles do their respective things in the skies over Texas here today. And, Dan, we're approaching the five-minute mark into the flight. Super Heavy is descending rapidly. What can we expect here in the next few minutes as it does its atmospheric tests? Now, as we had talked about, Super Heavy might not have a very smooth ride down. We're going to be putting it through this higher angle of attack, so we're kind of pitching it up a tiny bit, increasing drag. We've done this in wind tunnels. We've done this in computer modeling. It shows that sometimes the control isn't great, but only one way to really prove it out, and that's to get real-world data. So here comes Super Heavy. It should be igniting for its landing burn in just about 40 seconds from now. And we are going to relight 13 engines, then bring that down to three engines. As we talked about earlier, we will be intentionally shutting down. We will be shutting down one of those three center engines intentionally to push the limits of the Super Heavy booster. And continuing to see six healthy engines on the ship, three sea level, and three vacuum engines still ignited as the Super Heavy booster is making its way back down to Earth. We can see those grid fins doing some heavy work. Ignited for our landing burn. It may have ended with that landing burn. It does look like we lost telemetry from the booster once we started into that landing burn. Did you see our confirmation that the booster did demise? So the booster's flight ending before it was able to get through landing burn, but again, we are not bringing that back. We're expecting it to make a hard splashdown in the Gulf. We were getting live data back the entire time through that high angle of attack flight, so that was something that was really vital for us to get during this reuse. First free flight of booster in the books. All right, ship has about two minutes left. In about two minutes, we expect all six Raptor engines to shut down. That will be SECO, basically second engine or second stage engine shut off. And these are some incredible views, Dan, from the aft end of the ship, watching as the engines stay ignited with the Earth in the background. As always, the Starship avionics team, the techs, I think we just heard the booster. But all right, we got about a minute left into this burn. All eyes definitely on ship as we get through the final stages into its ascent. We're expecting it to start to cut those engines off in about 45 seconds. Terminal guidance. All right, just about 30 seconds to go. We're in terminal guidance in the final stages of this ascent burn. We did see shutdown of the Raptor engines. We do stagger these, so we do the Raptors first. Those three have shut down successfully. Sea level is still running. Ship engine cut off. Now we are expecting the payload door to open any moment now. So we're watching out for that. Again, you're looking at the inside of Starship as it's suborbital. Well, we heard the door open was in progress. It was unable to actuate all the way open, so they are going to close it back up. Hal told me no. He said, I'm sorry, Dan. Can't do that. Looks like we won't get the door open today. But that's okay. This is obviously a test we want to be able to do before we're deploying full-on Starlinks. But the real focus for this, now that we are in space, is getting to that reentry. That is the most critical phase of Starship that we still have to prove out. All right, so 36 minutes, 15 seconds into today's flight tests. You're seeing some flat movement here on the ship. If you've been following along, we have essentially lost attitude control on the ship at this point. It is suborbital, so it's still headed to the exact same trajectory as before. We were not able to get that payload door open and deploy those nose cones. We've been dealing with some leaks on the ship. This is also what led to that loss of attitude control. So at this point, we are kind of in a spin. And we are also going to be skipping that Raptor relight. If you've followed through the history of Starship, something similar happened, different cause but same symptom, back on Flight 3, where we weren't able to maintain attitude control in orbit. And so we're going to skip the relight of that Raptor engine while we're in space. We are going to still proceed with entry, but as we are not able to control the attitude of the ship, as we get into entry, it will enter in whatever orientation it is in at the time, which does not bode well for the ship's heat shield, as we're not going to be essentially aligned the way that we want to do for reentry. So it is definitely coming down. It is definitely heading to the Indian Ocean. But our chances of making it all the way down are pretty slim. So we'll still get as much data as we can. We're still getting live telemetry, live views from Starlink the entire time. And we'll continue to stick with ship as it continues on. We are about 10 minutes away or so until we start getting into entry. All right, so we are 42 minutes and change into today's flight test. You're seeing the light show start as Starship is getting closer to its reentry. If you're just tuning in, we were able to successfully make it to orbit, run into a couple of issues as we've coasted to our entry point over the Indian Ocean. At this point, we had lost attitude control of the ship and entered into a spin. The team made the call to do what's called passivate the vehicle. So we're essentially venting all of the remaining propellant overboard. And it's going to make an uncontrolled reentry. Important to note, this is a contingency that is planned for. And we clear the zones in the Indian Ocean where these entries could take place. So we're not going to come down exactly where we would have had nothing happened. But we do clear a tremendous amount of space out in the Indian Ocean in the event that we run into this. We understand that there are always risks essentially with these flight tests, with the hardware. But we don't really accept any compromise when it comes to protecting people. Again, we are in essentially a tumble. We had lost that attitude control. So Starlink, when it's able to connect, able to feed this down. We are at the phase where we would expect entry to start within the next minute or so. So we are entering uncontrolled. But again, we're entering into an airspace and a sea space that is cleared and monitored in advance of launch and before we get to this phase. And with the views that we are able to see, you are seeing a lot of that plasma build up. During reentry, we do expect the vehicle to see about 1,400 degrees Celsius. And there you can see the flap feeling that temperature there, a little bit melting away. We are no longer controlling the attitude of the vehicle. So this is now at this point in the test flight. It is expected to see it begin to demise a little bit on its way back down to Earth. Yeah. And so we'll stick with it for as long as we're kind of getting any reach back from the ship as it starts to make this reentry. But, yeah.