Highlights From Starship's Test Flight 9: Everything That Happened in 17 Minutes

6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

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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

Alright 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

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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..

Boost back, shut down. And there we had a good shutdown of the boost back burn

Next up will be the jettison of that hot stage ring. 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 re-entry, 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 4 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 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

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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

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. Booster landing startup. 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 your 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 reflight of booster In the books

Alright ship Has about two minutes left And 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

All right, we've 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. Alright, 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 cutoff. Ship engine cutoff

The three most beautiful words in the English language. And great call out that we had nominal insertion

An incredible flight test so far today. We re-flew a super heavy booster for the very first time in nine test flights

This ship is in its orbital trajectory. Again, it's going to remain suborbital for its mission today

But it ignited all six of its engines and made it all the way through Seaco just now

Hey, Chris. How's it going over there in Hawthorne, man? How's everybody doing

I think the elation and the excitement and the happiness at what we just saw achieved carried through across all of our sites

What an incredible view to see Starship back orbiting the Earth just under 11 minutes into our mission

Absolutely exciting to see all of this and super pumped especially to see all of the team's hard work in action here today

As guaranteed, it has been an exciting evening so far for Starship's ninth test flight

We lifted off a little bit after 6.30 p.m. after a couple of holds that were triggered at the T-40 mark

But we were able to clear those, one on the Raptor, one on the Tower. And we were able to lift off successfully from Starbase

33 out of 33 Raptor engines lit on the Super Heavy. All six engines lit on ship, bringing it to its planned suborbital trajectory around Earth

But as Dan said, we've got a lot still coming up in our flight sequence

So coming up at about T plus 18 minutes, 26 seconds, we'll have the first deployment of simulated Starlink satellites planned from Starship

That will be followed at about T plus 37 minutes and 49 seconds by the relight of a single Raptor sea level engine in space

This is going to help us gather data on our ability to do a de-orbit burn for future Starship missions that will go orbital

And then, of course, one of the biggest tests yet to come is the new heat shield modifications to Starship

And that'll start with re-entry into Earth's atmosphere at about the T plus 45 minute mark, which should take about 16, 18 minutes to complete

And now today's re-entry is going to test that heat shield like we said

Specifically, how Starship will hold up to 100 missing heat shield tiles on its thermal protection system

Now, we purposely took those 100 tiles off over very critical areas of the vehicle to be able to safely test on a flight like this suborbital trajectory into the Indian Ocean

What might happen on an operational flight in those areas if we were to lose the primary heat shield tile over Starship

So, very critical test coming up. And then after that, we'll have the final descent where we will again be pushing Starship to its limits

We definitely pushed the booster to its limits today to gather data, and we're going to be doing the exact same thing on that ship

seeing how the ship handles various flight conditions that we will need it to fly in

as we look to one day soon bring ships back to Starbase for catch and reuse

In a few minutes, Starship will deploy eight Starlink simulators, similar in size to our next-generation Starlink satellites

The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship

meaning they will passively re-enter the atmosphere just like Starship. With tests like these, we can see how Starship's payload deploy systems work in flight

while ensuring that the simulator satellites pose no safety risk to people on Earth

or for other satellites in orbit. Look inside of the payload bay of Starship

You can see them stacked down in the middle of your view. There's kind of four on either side, so they're sandwiched on top of each other

a stack of four right behind each other. and then we going to pop the door open It on the right side of your screen so we see that open up and then start firing those Starlink simulators out into space

We are expecting the payload door to open in a little over a minute from now

And then once that payload door is open, about a couple minutes later is when we will start dispensing those Starlink simulators

That's a view right at the bottom of the stack. So you should be able to see them kind of firing out from right there

So really cool. And eventually these are going to carry dozens of the next generation of Starlink satellite into space

And those are going to enable some truly insane things in terms of speeds from space

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 its 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. And the ship is on its suborbital trajectory

As you can see in some of the views And from some of the telemetry

We are in a little bit Of a spin We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank

Systems inside of Starship Which a lot of those are used For your attitude control

And so at this point We've essentially lost our attitude Control with Starship

We are still on a path toward re-entry We are suborbital So no matter what, we are going to enter

However, this lowers the chances for it to be a controlled reentry

So if you think back to Flight 3, when we had something similar happen

just the end symptom of a loss of attitude control, we were in a roll by the time we hit reentry

So we are going to reenter. We should hopefully still have views

The Starlink satellites are pretty robust to still maintaining contact. We've got four of those terminals on the vehicle, and they're pretty robust to maintaining contact

even when we are in a spin, essentially. So we should hopefully continue to keep live views

It's going to still be dark until we get a little bit closer to entry, as we are a little bit

We're coming up on Africa. I believe we do swing just to the south of that continent

And by the time we start heading out over the Indian Ocean, we'll start heading into a sunrise

So, not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today

where we were hoping to do the PES deploy and relight an engine, and then really importantly get into that controlled entry

to really put the heat shield through the ringer. Nonetheless, Starship marching forward towards that reentry over the Indian Ocean

so we'll continue to hang with it and give you any updates as things continue to change

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

Fuse are going to be a little bit scarce potentially, as 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

inside of the ship and we did lose attitude control. Just to confirm, we did lose contact

with the ship officially a couple of minutes ago, so that brings an

end to the ninth flight test