Starship Flight 12 Ship 39 Splashdown after Booster 19 LOST on Landing...Here's What Happened!

Once again, we were not going to bring the super-heavy booster back to the tower. We were planning on having it land in the Gulf. That's 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, ignition. Fitching downrange. Booster option, chamber pressure nominal. All right, we are T plus 30 seconds into flight. Seeing 33 out of 33 Raptor 3 engines on booster V3. Ascending over the Gulf now. Coming up on maximum aerodynamic pressure. Booster in ship, avionics power, telemetry nominal. System's looking good. We're just passing through the period of maximum dynamic pressure. A little over a minute into flight now. Vibration's chilling out here. At Star Factory as we continue to watch Starship flight 12 arc out over the Gulf. The next major thing coming up is going to be hot staging. Booster prop system nominal. We do what's our version of MECO. Most engines cut off. So we're going to shut down all but five of the Raptor engines on the booster. And then after that happens, we're going to ignite the six engines on ship while it is still attached. We have clamps that hold the two together. Those are going to retract inside of that hot stage ring. Kind of protect them. We had one of the engines go out still flying on 32 of the Raptor engines. But again, once we get the hot staging, those six engines on the ship are going to ignite. We're going to do it in a little bit different of a sequence on version three. Essentially, those three ARVAC engines will ignite first. Almost immediately after, just one of those central engines is going to ignite. And that's going to give the booster a bit of a kick, sending it in a known direction, followed shortly after by the other two. We're through MECO. New separation. There you go. Successful hot staging separation. We're not seeing as many booster engines ignite as we expected for boost back. But we are seeing six good engines lit on ship. It looks like we just had an early boost back shutdown. Again, a reminder, the booster was planned to essentially head into the Gulf for a splashdown. But it has shut its engines down early on into boost back. And we just see one of the ARVAC. So we're now running on five engines on ship. We do have engine out capability, so it's going to continue into its ascent. You got booster on the left there, ship on the right. Ship avionics. Again, we are not planning on bringing the booster back for this flight, as this was the very first time. All right. So about three minutes, 50 seconds into today's flight. Just a reminder, the ship planned to burn its engines for about eight minutes and change. About eight minutes and 11 seconds was our planned timeline for today. That could shift slightly as we do have one engine out running on one fewer ARVAC. Again, continuing to watch. So booster did not complete its boost back burn. We would not see all of the engines ignite that we expected. Are continuing to get some views from it, though. That's going to make a splashdown somewhere in the Gulf. Reminder, we clear air, sea space, everything for these launches. All right. So we are coming up on T plus five minutes. Ship continuing to fire five of the six. Standing by for callouts, making sure ship's on its planned trajectory. Again, we are planning a suborbital trajectory for the ship today. Booster giving us some views as it continues to make its way back down towards the water. All right. So a little over five and a half minutes in flight. Kate, Jake, you guys with me? Looks like boosters starting to come in hot. Yeah, we had the opportunity to stand outside to watch launch. And wow, that was incredible. Yeah, that was really loud, really shaky. And I was actually surprised how fast the booster got off the pad or the whole stack. That was that was quite incredible. Absolutely. So we have views here from the booster coming back down, making its way into the Gulf. Pretty cool to see healthy chamber pressures on five out of six. She prepped her engines. Great news there for the Starship. Once again, we were not going to bring the super heavy booster back to the tower. We were planning on having it land in the Gulf. And it looks like the booster ended its mission there in the Gulf. But we've got a ship still flying. Great to see that still have five out of six engines there on S-39. Yes, we also heard good chamber pressures as well on those engines that are lit. We do have engine out capability. We do see that we have one of the RVAC, one of the Raptor vacuum engines that is currently out. But that's OK. Ship is continuing on. Amazing views of planet Earth there in the background. Yeah, I love the S-39 decal there. That just gives the gives the ship a little bit of character. And again, all these great views brought to you by Starlink, of course. Yeah, obligatory shout out to the entire Starship avionics. Camera electronics team did a whole lot of work to get these upgraded cameras. A look inside of the ship skirt. You can see those three center engines ignited. The RVAC is continuing to fire as well. We did we did see at least a couple engines fire up on booster for that landing burn before we lost contact with it. We should have just a little over 20 seconds to go. We'll see if the burn extends a little bit. For the engine out, essentially, you can run your engines a little bit longer, throttle up a little bit more to account for the one engine not being lit. So right now we are standing by for sea go. And again, we are continuing to go a little bit longer. Five engines still burning on ship. You're coming up on T plus nine minutes and starting to see shut down. RVACs have shut down. Sea levels are shut down. Seeing if we can get an update on the ship orbit insertion. But we have shut down again. We did run longer as we were engine out. We were flying with five of those six Raptors pretty much the whole time. Ship is safe. All right, well, we definitely got a ship in space right now. As you can see, the teams are incredibly excited to see Starship there in space. We are awaiting the call out of nominal insertion. So we're going to stand by for that. We can see the flaps moving here, actuating. But wow, the cheers here in the lobby are certainly almost as loud as liftoff was. Yeah, yeah, man, a lot of action going on. And, you know, we said at the top of the show, excitement guaranteed. And we're only 11 minutes in. We still have a lot more to go here on the mission today. So all objectives are done on the booster. So now all eyes are on the ship as we get ready for our in space objectives. Exactly. So like I said, we're still standing by to hear the call out for nominal orbital insertion. But we've got a few minutes before the next milestone. So we're going to continue. We've got some amazing views here of the ship. Wow. It's just that this is our planet. This is our home. Coming up right on the part of the timeline when we were expecting it. You look inside a Starship there. Oh, I see a door opening. Looks like Hal didn't wait. PEZ door is open. Just a reminder, we've got 22 deployables in the payload bay today. 20 of those Starlink mass simulators. And then two are our Dodger dogs, as we like to call them internally, sitting out there, modified V2 Starlink satellites. Those are going to be testing a bunch of components that we're planning to fly on Starlink V3. And we've also got them outfitted with a number of cameras for another tech demo that we're trying out on this flight. We definitely are looking for a way that we can look at Starship's heat shield while it's still in space. You can kind of only see so much from the cameras and the flaps. You can't see everything kind of on the underbelly. And one of the only ways you can do that is if you've got something else flying near it. So we're going to attempt to... Our final two satellites going out the door have a suite of cameras on them that are going to be looking back at the ship. We're going to be in nighttime. And so we've got... Oh, sounds like we're getting into payload deploy. We'll be in nighttime. They've got some powerful flashlights on them to try and illuminate the ship's heat shield while we fly away from it. So we see some PEZ motion. Two down, 20 to go. As a reminder, that's one of the things that we upgraded in version three. Kind of gave a little soup up to the PEZ dispenser. So those satellites are going to move out a little bit quicker than they did on previous Starship flight tests. So first two out the door, two more on their way out. All right, four down, 18 to go. Flexing my basic math skills here today. Again, the majority of this stack, 20 of these 22 satellites, they're essentially just math simulators. So they're roughly the same size as those Starlink V3 sats that we're hoping to fly later this year. And from this top-down view, so you're looking down at the stack, those two satellites you see on the very top, that they'll look very different. They've got solar arrays. They've got a bunch of other deployables on them that we're going to be testing out that are going to be V3 tech. And they've got three engineering cameras and then one other camera that's hopefully going to be giving us some views of Starship in space. But we will see how that works. Again, this is very much a tech demo. We're going to deploy those. The satellite's going to kind of try and turn everything on, look back at Starship. And the primary reason we're trying to do this is to get some views of the heat shield. All right, two more out the door. Two more out the door. And I think that counts, or that comes up to eight total. As you can tell, the teams are stoked to see this demonstration happening. It's pretty incredible to see this happening live from space. Now, as we noted earlier in the show, but worth repeating, this Starship, version three, is built to deploy up to 60 of Starlink's more advanced V3 satellites. Everything's V3. Designed to offer 60 terabits per second of downlink capacity per satellite. Now, that is 20 times more than each Falcon 9 does today. Incredible. All right, I think that's number 10 going out the door. Yeah, there it goes. So yeah, the camera view you have on your left screen there is basically right at the bottom of the payload volume. So the kind of dome-shaped structure you see there is, that's actually the top of the fuel tank. Then the camera view that you have on the right is an external camera that we have positioned so that you can see basically the light through the open PES dispenser door that you see, that's that sliver of light. We can see the Starlinks here deploying as each one comes through. As we mentioned, we have 20 of these Starlink simulator satellites. And then we have two of these specially modified, as we call them, Dodger dogs around here. As Dan mentioned earlier, they have some V3 tech on them, some solar arrays, and those will be the last two that will be deployed today. Yeah, that's right. And seeing this, I think Dan called them turbocharged or supercharged PES dispenser, it's definitely coming out much faster than our previous flights. So that is really good to see. Yeah, look at that. And especially once we, you know, fill Starship up all the way with around 60 or so of these Starlinks, being able to deploy them fairly expediently, you know, it's going to be important for designing the overall mission profile. Yeah. Now, fans of Starship may know that Starlink enables lots of unprecedented views, both from space, as we see here, and on Earth. In addition to the dozens of cameras on Starship itself, we also have mobile Starlink camera kits deployed in the Indian Ocean. Yes, Starlink also connects our aerial cinematography units on the ground at Starbase and at other strategic camera spots around Texas. It's all part of how it all comes together to tell the incredible story of Starship, both on and off planet. Yep. All right, we're getting low on the stack. It looks like we got two more of those simulators to go out, and then it will be time for our Dodger dogs, those modified Starlink satellites. Just a couple of updates while we continue to watch payload deploy. Did get confirmation we're going to be skipping that relight of the Raptor engine, just due to everything that we saw on the way uphill. Those sea-level engines, we're going to use them for a landing burn, though. They are still capable to be used for that, so we'll still look to do a controlled landing in the Gulf, but no in-space relight. All right, I think that's 19 and 20 headed out the door, and coming up are our Dodger dogs. So these are modified V2 Starlink satellites. We do have a number of cameras on these that are going to attempt to look back at Starship. We're not going to get this video in real time, but we're going to try and turn it around if we do get some video down. So don't worry, if we get views of Starship from these satellites, we will be sharing. These will be exciting because, again, they're really a tech demo, getting our chance to test out some of the technologies for version 3. All right, I think that's 18 and 20. My basic math skills are failing now. All right, here we go. We're standing by for Starship, basically to serve the first Dodger dogs to low Earth orbit. One out the door, and from this view, you can kind of see on the right side of the satellite, you see some bright white spots. Those are our flashlights beneath them. The camera is going to attempt to look back and image Starship's heat shield as it flies slowly away from the vehicle. And there it goes. Let there be light. Yeah, it almost looks like the light is just shining right at us there. Yeah. Always sunny in space. And that looks like an empty payload bay. Sure does. That's exactly what you want to see there. That's great. So yeah, with payload deploy complete... Oh, you can see the door closing there. All right, there we go. So yeah, with payload deploy complete, Starship will now close... Yeah, Starship, we closed the payload door, and we're going to continue to coast around Earth all the way to the Indian Ocean. So still a lot of major events to come today. Sounds like we're not going to hit that Raptor relight, based on what Dan was saying. But after that, of course, we'll have the atmospheric re-entry and splashdown. All right, so... Surprise! Looks like our cameras did work. We've made contact with both of those satellites. We're going to roll that back again. Again, this is a view from one of those satellites as we deployed. It looks like this was from the last one out. Flashlight turning on, taking a look at Starship in space. The way this system is set up is the satellites are essentially recording it and making contact with our Starlink constellation, and then transferring that video back down to us on the ground. That's a Starship in space. Aside from just being really cool, this was our test to try and develop a free flyer that we could fire outside of Starship's payload bay, look back at it, and then do essentially a pirouette with Starship to get a look at the heat shield, where it's going to be really important when we start bringing these things back for a catch, which we are hopefully doing in the not-too-distant future, as they are intended to be fully reusable. But this will give us an opportunity to look at the heat shield while Starship is still in space. There was a glimpse. We'll see if we get any more video down from those satellites, but that's one we've been chasing for a while, so really cool to see it come to fruition here on Flight 12. All right, coming up on 40 minutes into the flight, and we should start hitting the reentry period in the next seven minutes or so. You'll start to see a light show building up. As we had talked about, we did skip that on-orbit relight of the Raptor engine. It's not needed for our trajectory or anything. We are on the suborbital trajectory to splash down in the Indian Ocean. We are going to attempt a landing burn. We'll see how they perform when we get there. And just a reminder, we are going to be stressing the ship on the way in. We're going to intentionally do a maneuver where we're going to kind of pitch the nose up and deploy those aft, those bottom flaps to really put a lot of pressure on them. So we'll see how it does through that maneuver, and then we'll be doing kind of a final banking turn before we get to a landing burn. So all that coming up in a few minutes. The light show should start beginning real soon. All right, so the light show continuing. We are through the period of peak heating, and we'll be looking at the peak pressure coming up in the next couple of minutes. The next 10 minutes are probably going to be the spiciest of entry today. As a reminder, we are going to be doing some stress work on this ship where we're going to do a maneuver where we kind of kick the nose up to fully deploy those aft flaps to really get a good test of the structural strength of that part of the ship. We did that on one previous flight test on version two. We're going to try and do that today. 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 going to put a little bit of extra stress on those forward flaps as we come in. So we will see if they're able to hold through that re-entry. So that will be another watch item. We did skip that in-space burn, but we are expecting at least two of those sea-level engines to try and ignite for a landing burn. We entered the entry period in a good attitude, 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 a 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. You've watched those. We were really intentionally trying to push ship beyond its limits. On the last flight, we even had 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. But right now, we're really going to be testing the structural strength of these flaps on the way in. 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 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. Although we have, you know, scrubbed off a substantial amount of our speed already. Altitude at a little less than 60 kilometers. Definitely a pretty cool thing we're demoing here on the ship. You know, as in the future, we are going to be trying to bring the ship back to the launch site, which is going to be absolutely insane. Absolutely. But of course, we want to test out these maneuvers, these principles prior to actually bringing the hardware back to the pad. This is the same reason why we were, 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. And, you know, really proving what a test flight is. Reentry is typically a portion of flight where we don't have communications with the spacecraft because it's reentering at or around orbital velocity, roughly eight kilometers per second, 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 forming around the vehicle. Yeah, and although the plasma looks really cool, 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 where we're going with the propulsive landing instead of a more traditional means like parachutes. 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 eight, the first belly flop. I remember it well. There's 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 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. Landing burn startup. To hear, but it is the truth. Absolutely wild. We, you know, at the beginning of the show, we guaranteed excitement at the beginning of the show. And I'd say Starship delivered. An incredible day for Starship. That was the first flight of that completely redesigned vehicle. As you can tell, the teams are incredibly proud of what we just saw.