See SpaceX Starship's full Earth re-entry, splashdown and explosive ending

second or about 5 m per second of roughly orbital velocity now those speeds the spacecraft moving through the atmosphere results in friction and creates a plasma field around the vehicle we saw this uh in action on flight four thanks to starlink and wow it was breathtaking that blank the blanket of plasma ends up distorting communication frequency so it's not uncommon to experience brief blackouts and communication but hopefully that's not the case today and and Kate that's that's that's where starlink has just kind of been just the unsung hero and the MVP of this test campaign

I mean it's able to give us data not just awesome video but also data in real time as we're going through re-entry I mean this is something that throughout the history of space flight just hasn't been possible and this is an environment that is so unforgiving so hard to model so hard to understand and for the first time ever we're able to literally watch as it unfolds in real time get that data in real time and we're able to do that with starlink and it's it's great for us because we get to see something we

get to see the greatest light show on the planet or off the planet um but what it means for this program we're we're able to learn tremendous amounts about our heat shield our angle of attack everything that we're doing as we're coming in through the ad atmosphere at Hypersonic speeds and it's you you can't just thank it enough and also special shout out you're you're going to see some additional flap camera views we've got a really amazing team of avionics cameras electronic software people who made all that possible and so hopefully they're going to give

us an even better show on the way in today as we're coming in at about five times the speed of sound yeah those flaps Dan that you see there that's what's helping Starship is in a good attitude for entry approaching the entry into face and some good call outs there preparing for a re-entry for Starship uh and again that's what uh Dan was mentioning those flaps on the vehicle and if you've been watching us for the the last few minutes you could see that the flaps were uh rotating around and helping Orient the vehicle as

It prepares for the beginning of re-entry today yeah exactly re-entry will be enabled by that heat shield that you see on the bottom half uh that heat shield is made up of 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles and they are designed to insulate the vehicle during atmospheric entry uh at that point in time temperatures can be as high as 26,000 de fahr or about, 1400° C um they the the the design itself also permit for Rapid reuse with no refurbishment between the flights and fun fact that I think is just incredible in terms of uh uh scale

but the heat shield alone on the ship has a total mass of 10.5 tons which is crazy because these things are really lightweight uh they're made out of ceramic we have a couple of them here the one that I'm holding is used on flat surfaces as uh let's see if we go that way um because as it's flat the one that Jesse has is kind of more what you see there on the side yeah exactly and having these different uh shapes the flat version and the curved version allow us to cover a lot more of

the surface area of the vehicle again we need to protect every portion of it so even uh even those curved surfaces and especially the hinge area uh if you watched flight four uh is really what we want to make sure that we protect um and yeah Kate these are very very lightweight but when you put 18,000 of them together they add up to 10.5 tons which is incredible now we did mention earlier that the heat shield has been completely reworked the atmosphere remains on a nominal entry trajectory we can start to see that plasma now

starting to build up on the side it's not quite full plasma yet um but we are starting to see that color indicate uh that the heat is building up on the heat shield yeah this is such a cool site to see cuz you really never really have gotten to see this live before uh before flight uh before flight 4 yeah um and as Kate mentioned it's getting uh a little more red as you can see there on your screen that means that heat is building up but that's exactly what these heat shield Tils are there

for is to protect against this plasma and this really really extreme heat that the vehicle is going to see for the about the next uh 10 10 more minutes or so yeah so uh the ship will attempt to light the three Center Raptor engines uh and those are the engines that can gimbal or maneuver or point and they do that to help flip the ship um until the engines Point down so that it can land using the Raptor's thrust in the ocean so that will happen after we get through this re-entry period um again now

starting to see we also might start to see the flaps actuate a little bit here um as the vehicle controls its role uh during re-entry that was one of the main learning points from flight three was the roll control uh didn't work quite as well as we wanted it to we learned that we needed some redundancies so we added more roll control thrusters and we'll see those in action as well today um as that was a flight three learning that worked better on flight four and still enabling that same design today yeah Starship has passed

through 85 km altitude flaps now have control of the vehicle great call out as Kate mentioned the flaps are controlling the attitude of the vehicle and I love these views because it looks so calm uh everything is relative right so relative to this camera on the ship it looks so calm and smooth but the vehicle is traveling extremely fast you can see the speed on the bottom right hand corner of your screen Starship is designed to land on Mars where there are no runways or other humans to help out so we also want rapid reusability

so we're doing propulsive Landing instead of a more traditional means like parachutes um and so we will use the engines on this vehicle to help slow the vehicle down for a vertical Landing yeah now entry is going to basically happen in five phases the first is low drag that lasts for about 3 minutes next is high Heating and that begin that beginning when heating increases um uh above the uh heat rate breakup limit um that lasts for about 10 minutes we then have high Dynamic pressure um Starship will continue to slow down and experience increased

aerodynamic loads during that phase uh and that will happen before reaching Mach 1 about a minute after Starship is approaching the peak heating phase of Entry remains on a ninal trajectory okay so that was phase two that he just called out um that I was mentioning after peaking is that Dynamic pressure around Mach 1 and that will uh last about a minute after leaving the hypersonic area and then we go into subsonic and then of course Landing burn wow what an incredible view the colors are so amazing and the colors actually also tell you a

little bit about the temperature that the vehicle is seeing as well so I think that's pretty cool that we get this amazing live visual a live speaking of live visual the flap uh we have more views uh more cameras on board Starship as Dan mentioned a few minutes ago uh we are hoping that all four flaps will stay more intact than they did last time we did make some changes to the design in order to help enable Starship is now experiencing Peak heating remains on a nominal entry trajectory great news there that Starship is continuing

along the path that we intended it to fly you can keep track with how fast it's going and how high it is above Earth using the display that is there on the bottom right hand side of your screen and guys this is this is where we're really going to see a lot of those improvements from flight four really come into action is you guys kind of talked about so it's called the static Arrow those are kind of the poke out points on the flaps those get exposed to some pretty extreme heat environments and so we

added some additional basically made it a lot more robust for the thermal protection than there and we we learned not just from visuals and stuff like that we had those missing tile tests on flight four where we intentionally left some out kept in some backup layers they're called ablatives which means they just gradually melt away to help dissipate the Heat and we've got an entire layer of ablative underneath the tiles on this on this Starship today so even if you get a gap in a tile or a tile is broken anything like that we've got

entally backup options and what we're really trying to do today is do an ontarget Landing as we lost the flaps you lose a lot of your control and so we didn't land right on target last flight this time we're we're trying to really nail the target within just tens of meters um and that'll just be a really huge step on feeling like we're closer to bringing a ship back um obviously there's a lot of work before we get there but we just caught a booster we're g to start looking real soon at when we can

catch a ship so the view on your left is as a helicopter passes by Dan bound at Star base um The View on your left is a camera that's positioned near the nose of star of of the ship looking basically down toward the flap um The View on the right is looking perpendicular to the flap so we're looking basically bird's eye view onto the flap on the left hand side and then a worm's eye view uh from the side with that view on the right yeah sorry about that guys Maverick just buzzed the tower he

might be he might be coming back so now these views uh brought To Us by starlink is it's incredible that we have this High defin capability in fact that view on the left Starship is now halfway through the peak heating phase of Entry remains on a good trajectory uh so great news there hearing that we're about halfway through the uh the peak heating phase like I said um uh earlier this last roughly 10ish minutes um and we did hear earlier that the flaps have control of the vehicle so also good news there um you know

is incredible that we've basically had views the entire time right yeah Al to stering my memory did black out a little bit after booster catch so I think we had views uh but you know all through the coast phase we had some beautiful views of of planet Earth behind the ship as it was in its orbit yeah and I I also do want to point out on your right hand screen we've got a a more encompassed view of the flap um as we watched in in Flight four the hinge area was the area where we

got a little bit of that burn through this view this new camera view on the ship will help us be able to visually see uh more of what's happening in that area and again we have uh improved our uh heating tiles and so hopefully we've projected the hinge a lot better this time chill has started but again these views are additional um to the data that we get on these flight tests that help enable us kind of put the data that we get in the computer um to the visuals that we see and try and

align those and and use that for improvements in the future now we heard a call out there saying that engine chill has begun uh this is an indication that we are starting to flow a little bit of the uh super cold liquid oxygen through uh the hardware through the Raptor engine specifically the turbo pumps uh to help Ure that the hardware is at the right temperature uh before we give a full push a full flow of propellant uh at engine startup so all of that to say we are getting closer to the landing bird we

definitely are and again if you look at your the bottom right hand of your screen you can see the altitude that the ship is and it has been slowly making its way closer and closer to Earth we're currently at about 63 km from planet Earth um and you'll see that number uh Trend lower and lower as we get closer and uh continue through this re-entry yeah this is going to go on for a little actually um a while longer we have about 10 minutes or so roughly um before we execute the uh The Landing the

ignition for the landing burn starting with the landing flip um so we're making a controlled re-entry this is one of the primary objectives for Starship today is to demonstrate another controlled re-entry even more controlled than what we saw on flight 4 and so far uh that is looking good and then as we as we start to really get lower we're going to start seeing the atmosphere's effects start to take place and that's when we'll start be we'll be dropping our speed down closer to the speed of sound you'll see the flaps start to maneuver um

we we were able to do a landing burn on flight four which kind of caught all of us off guard it was pretty incredible after seeing the flap survive through and we're going to try and do another one on this flight today we tweaked it a little bit so we're going to try and splash down at a little bit of a gentler angle uh this time instead of just kind of Hit the water and fall over and the goal with that is try and keep the ship intact and then if we're able to then get

some additional video of it again that's that's just more data and everything we can see see everything we can get extra like a couple extra seconds or minutes of data coming from the ship after pass through the peak heating pH of flight approaching maximum entry Dynamic pressure all right we're through Peak heating coming up is basically Max Q part two where we're going to hit kind of that that part of the curve where we're still moving really fast and the atmosphere is just dense enough that we're feeling feeling the most pressure but hopefully we're going

to start feeling a little bit less heat now looks like we got more views of each of the flaps on the ship as it's making its way back down to earth and we did pass through Peak Heating and still got really good views throughout that whole period typically during the highest uh heat on the vehicle we we tend to build up a lot of plasma and that's typically when we would uh lose you know connection um or views of the vehicle but again with starlink we were able to get some live views throughout the that

entire process there and we're coming up we'll start here in a couple more milestones in about 4 minutes or so uh when we start getting down to like the transonic the subsonic when we're we're starting to move closer to and beneath the speed of sound and I mean we're we're getting live views we're getting live data we've got a couple additional tests on this one today where we we left off some missing tiles again to to test some additional backup layers uh we also have I don't know if we can still quite see them in

this view but you may have noticed we had some kind of silvery looking tiles on on Starship as well and those were pretty much standard tiles but they were wrapped in aluminum and it was a pretty simplistic uh straightforward one where aluminum starts to melt at roughly the same temperature where steel starts to lose its strength not necessarily melt um and so if we if we see stuff melting we we know we know what our steel is going to be exposed to but um yeah 59 minutes since launch should be coming up on on transonic

and everything just about 3 minutes now the views here we have coverage of all four flaps we can see uh or so for those that perhaps didn't catch a glimpse of the vehicle before liftoff there are two flaps at the forward end and two flaps at the AFT end the larger camera view that is there on the right hand side of your screen that is a view of one of the AFT end or the bottom end flaps we can start to see some heat build up and peeking through on one of the flaps there in

the top leftand corner of your screen once again Starship now at t plus 1 hour and 9 seconds into its flight today re-entering the Earth's atmosphere spere uh currently about 45 km above the surface of the Earth Now 44 we are targeting a soft splash down in the Indian Ocean uh about you know oh northwes is of Australia and we are attempting to as we did on flight four make a uh perform a flip maneuver as well as a Starship is at maximum entry Dynamic pressure remains on a good trajectory all right so that is

great news there um like Dan said earlier this is basically Max Q part two so this is the greatest amount of uh of aerodynamic loads that the vehicle will experience during its flight it's coming back through the Earth's atmosphere you know it was uh above the Earth's atmosphere in space where there was no friction we can obviously see uh heat as a you know evidence of that friction buildup uh the atmosphere is actually helping to slow the vehicle down if you're watching the Telemetry in the bottom right hand side right hand corner of your screen

you can see that speed decelerating [Applause] rapidly now the four flaps on the ship help steer the vehicle and one of the main objectives for the ship today is to demonstrate controlled re-entry uh during this phase of flight this re-entry phase yeah we have six engines on ship but we only need three of them the three CLE engines uh we will have that flip maneuver happen very close to touching down for splash down we'll do that flip maneuver ignite those engines slow the vehicle down immediately and then hopefully have a what we call a soft

Splash what we call a soft splash down um in the water it's probably going to feel a little bit harder uh on the top of surface of the water but it'll look pretty gentle yeah and like we said earlier we hope to have some more views even of that phase of the flight so fingers cross that we can uh that we we can bring those to you um we are uh hoping to splash down softer than we did last time on flight four um right now Starship continuing to make its descent back to Earth at

Mark 2 remains on a good trajectory all right great news there that tells us that the vehicle is traveling twice more than or is traveling twice the speed of sound so we will then the next call out that we'll hear is that it is uh you know traveling about the speed of sound and then we will hear a call out that it is that will be the call out that it is transonic and then we will hear another call out saying that it is subsonic meaning going slower than the speed of sound Starship is transonic

there it is so at this so at this point in time uh we say transonic because certain parts of the vehicle like the flap that you see on your screen um might be experiencing air flow faster than the speed of sound while other parts of the ship may be experiencing airf flow Starship is in the subsonic belly flop all right so now the entire vehicle is traveling slower than the speed of sound so subsonic the crowd here at Mission Control hawthor also getting excited just like us we're awaiting uh a water landing we are we

going to reignite the three engines to perform that flip maneuver and we're basically uh about a minute and a half wow away from The Landing flip yeah the the crowd's getting excited here as we get closer and closer to splash down again just about a minute away from the expected splash down so we should see a lot happening um coming up here shortly we're currently having a view of one of the flaps um and it is a little bit dark on your screen but hopefully we'll get get some good views of the ship as it

makes that flip maneuver and uh TouchDown for splash down yeah the uh yeah guys we we saw that we saw that speed Drop Like a Rock so we're basically we're doing a belly flip right now or belly flop right now that's what's kind of if you saw the High Altitude campaign that's the unique thing about how Starship comes back so we've bled off pretty much all of the speed we're going to we're essentially at terminal velocity Starship is at 5 alude On Target five five to go coming up soon Landing burn 2 km away Starship

Is On Target approaching Landing burn start up so keep an eye on the bottom right hand side of your screen as well well that will be the indicator when the Raptor engines ignite if we are unable to see that illumination ourselves Landing burn startup what a cool view of the reflection of that Landing burn you can see the water just behind the ship [Applause] [Music] sh is an incredible view I think it is safe to say we have a ship in the water touchdown that mycean surface what an incredible end to starship's Journey a live

view from a buoy that we had out at the Landing [Applause] Zone an incredible View ship Landing just about On Target as they were calling out that was amazing and we did we were not intending to recover any of the ship's Hardware so that was the the best ending that we could have hoped for man I I don't think we're going to be able to get a a ton of extra video of the heat shield but we hit the target we hit the target yeah I mean you know we hit the target because we had

these booies placed in a pretty specific spot so wow um what a day I feel like that's all that's what I get to say what a day um I mean every everything started off today with with that launch uh we were able to lift off towards the end of our window 7:25 a.m. Central Time uh 33 out of 33 Raptors in the way uphill successful hot stage booster came back we watched it come down right behind us watched it get caught and that like that broke my brain for a while um I'm really happy we

had Coast for a bit but that's first ever booster catch major step on the way to Rapid reusability and ship just gave us one heck of a show making it through a controlled re-entry this time flaps intact made it down to the water uh Hey starships were meant to fly and it sure as hell flew today