It's mind-blowing! What SpaceX Starship Flight 13 just Did Shocked whole Industry. Musk Declared

Lucky number 13. A hell of a flight for Starship. While it is floating in the water, skiffle is pitching downrange. Booster raptor chamber pressure is nominal. 30 seconds into flight. 33 out of 33 raptor engines lit on the super heavy booster arcing away from us here at Starbase. Coming up on max Q, maximum aerodynamic pressure, which again for this flight is going to be higher than it has been on any of our previous Starship flights. Maximum aerodynamic pressure over a minute now into flight. Still seeing 33 out of 33 raptor engines lit and burning. Our next major moment is going to be coming up in just a little over a minute from now when we're going to get to hot staging. We're going to shut down all but five of those engines on the booster. It's our version of MECO. Most engines cut off. And then we're going to ignite the six engines on the ship while it is still attached to do that separation. As a reminder, we try to do a directional flip. So when you watch on your screen, we're hopefully going to be sending that booster towards the bottom of the frame. For the booster itself, it's like doing a flip up that'll go towards the bottom of your frame. We do that by lighting the engines in a slightly staggered sequence. Standing by for hot staging. All but five engines down. Six ignite. And the booster now doing its boost back burn. It looks like we lit all 33 initially. Now we're down to 13. We're seeing six out of six raptors lit on the ship. And boost back burn shut down. So it looks like we were able to get through the boost back burn this time around. It was one of the key objectives we didn't have on the last flight. And we've got six engines lit on the ship. All right. So that's the first of two burns that the booster is going to be doing to kind of send it back towards us. It's going to be landing a couple of miles offshore from Starbase, hopefully. We're going to try and get it all the way down to do a landing burn where we're going to use those 13 center engines. They're going to ignite. That's what's going to really bleed off all that velocity that it's built up. And it'll eventually, hopefully transition to five engines to kind of fine tune its path in and then all the way down to three for the remaining bit. All right. We've got a couple of minutes to go until we get there. So booster is going to coast for a little bit. Ship still seeing six out of six raptor engines lit. Four minutes into the flight. Ship's got about four minutes left. Getting some killer views. Kate, Nate, how was the view from out from down there? It was incredible. I mean, it just shot off the pad and seeing all the crowd now running back inside to take views on the screen here. It's it was amazing. Yeah. One of these days I'm going to learn to not stare at the engines because now I have a bright blob in my vision. Now, speaking of vision, we could see both stages there on your screen. Starship second stage is still firing its engines. You can follow along with that with the GUI down on the bottom right hand side of your screen. Still following the planned flight path as well. Beautiful views of planet Earth there behind the ship. That's right. And we're actually getting a live shot off the booster right now on board camera. You can see the plume from Starbase. We're just lifted off five minutes ago on nominal trajectory. We are there. We are there. That is us. I kind of want to run back outside and wave. Right. Right. Now, again, this booster is not planning to come back to the tower or to launch site for this particular launch. We are going to be planning to do an ocean splashdown just off the coast of Starbase. So hoping to still get some amazing views of that. Pretty awesome to see the raptor engines there on the left hand side of your screen. We can actually see the plume there of those center raptors. Those those are the sea level ones, as well as the vacuum raptors are the three on the larger ones on the outer radius. Now, just like on tower catches, we are going to be doing a 13 engine landing burn to slow the booster down. Hopefully we can get a live camera of the booster right now as we're going into that phase. Awesome shot. You can see it there. So right now, the booster is using their three hypersonic grid fins to guide itself through the atmosphere toward its landing site. You can see we're only five kilometers above the sea right here. Just heard the call out for a landing burn startup for the booster. I have a feeling the crowd's about to go wild here. And another awesome landing for Super Heavy. Congratulations to all the teams here at Starbase and at our SpaceX team. An amazing, amazing view. I'll give you some updates we hear otherwise. And there you go. You can see our first Starlink V3 getting deployed out of Starship. Huge milestone for the team out here. Yeah, the crowd is definitely hyped about this. You can see these Starlink V3s continuing to pop out with deployment assisted by the PEZ dispenser. Now, this version of Starship is built to deploy up to 60 of these more advanced Starlink version three satellites. Each V3 is designed to offer one terabit per second of dowlink capacity. Now, let's put that into Falcon 9 terms real quick. A Starship launch with V3 satellites will launch 20 times the capacity into the constellation as a single launch of V2 satellites on Falcon 9. Just incredible. And anybody that follows Starship, you know that the views that we're being treated to right now, the views we get during those reentries, that's made possible by Starlink. It's given us just this unprecedented look into Starship as it's flying through space, hurtling through the atmosphere. It's powering the dozens of cameras we have on board. It's giving us real time data on every system that's telemetered on board that vehicle in real time. We use the exact same constellation to power all of our cameras that we have out in the field here in the Indian Ocean. So really powerful technology for just connecting you no matter where the heck you are on the planet, off the planet. So thank you, Starlink, for letting me watch this stuff as we fly through space. It's pretty awesome. We get about 240 megabits per second of data rate off Starship, which everybody in the spaceflight community knows that's pretty insane when you're usually dealing with single digits on some of the older systems. So gives you a lot of insight, gives you a lot of ability to just rapidly iterate, know what the heck happened when things go wrong. But looks like we're seeing some more satellites get out the door. We do have cameras on some of them. The last couple that are going to go out are going to try and do the heat shield imaging that we attempted last flight. We don't have that camera view that we got on flight 12 where you kind of see the satellite leaving Starship. Those aren't on the V3 satellites. But we are going to, on the last couple that go out, have some pretty narrow field view cameras that are going to be looking back at Starship, turn on some flashlights. And this is a test of a capability that we're really going to want when we start doing orbital flights to just add that extra layer of safety, that extra layer of reliability where we're going to be able to image Starship's heat shield after it's gone through after it's been in space before it re-enters. So we're going to try to test that again today, get some imagery of Starship's heat shield. 17 out the door, three more to go, and 18. These ones might be coming out, starting to see motions. 19 out the door, one more. It looks like we got a crowd at our Hawthorne, California location, followed by atmospheric re-entry where the heat shield will be put to test and eventually our splashdown. You see relight there on your screen. Wow. And confirmation over the net, relight shutdown, the burn has ended. Congrats to the team on this milestone. I mean, it's crazy to see how we can maneuver in space and just another icing on the cake for today's mission. Right. So re-entry, it's a critical phase of flight and we need information on how the ship's systems perform. That blanket of plasma distorts communication frequencies. So you heard that call out flaps, do you have control of the vehicle? You can actually see one view. Three Raptors, the three in the middle to light up, do a flip. Descending into the Indian Ocean, down to one, and we're in the water. And it's a soft splashdown in the water. That is a first. That is the softest splashdown we have ever had with the Starship there in the Indian Ocean. It's bound to be an exciting day for our recovery team. I mean, that huge milestone to even get to soft splashdown, much less have the vehicle stay afloat. Yeah, the teams are super hyped here. That's a crowd here at Starbase Texas. Everyone's super excited. We never really get to see Starship floating so serenely in the Indian Ocean. So we're so congratulations to everyone at the team at Starbase, for Starlink, everyone here and around the company who've contributed to the Starship program as we make progress again towards a multi-planetary future. So thank you everyone for tuning in. You rewind the clock. Wow, look at that view of the Starship heat shield tiles. You can really see how the atmospheric re-entry, how it disperses the heat around the edge of the vehicle. I don't think we've seen quite that close before. We had tried in the past to do these splashdowns as softly as possible. We experimented with rolls and now we have one intact. So the recovery team is moving in with their drones and that we are still getting views from Starship. It is sending these via Starlink from the other side of the world while it is floating in the water after flying through space. Like this is just completely surreal right now. This is just a mountain of data that we're going to get back. This is going to be so critical for refining the heat shield, everything else. And the really good news is all of these views that we're seeing, you're looking at a pretty intact looking heat shield, which as a reminder, we were flying at a significantly higher dynamic pressure. So putting way more stress on this vehicle on the way uphill and it's sitting there in the water and I mean, look at it. So I'm a little bit over the moon on this. I know a lot of our team is just fascinated in the control room behind me. I mean, everybody is psyched. Everyone's gathered around their computers, looking at these closeups that we're getting of these heat shield tiles, 18,000 of them. I mean, you can probably count the ones that are missing right now on one hand. Like this is just absolutely incredible. And the fact that like the cameras on board the ship are still sending back video is just a little bit surreal. So wow. Lucky number 13. Hell of a flight for Starship. Get it all the way there in the water. Really great day for, for version three. So. All right. As, as Kate and Nate said, we're going to keep releasing more of this. Stay tuned. We've got some really cool stuff from some of the onboards that we caught. So keep following us on X at SpaceX, whole bunch more cool imagery from launch from the flight. That's going to be coming out soon. Yeah. Let's just close on that. I mean, look at Starship in the Indian ocean. That's fantastic. We'll see you all back here for the next flight test of Starship version three. With that, we'll say goodbye.