Transcription
It turns out that 13 is actually a lucky number for SpaceX because what they've just managed to achieve with this latest Starship test flight is almost beyond words. It is insane.
But that doesn't mean that everything was perfect. I'll say that there were two things that really surprised me about this flight. One good surprise and one not so good.
This all started with the weirdest Starship failure so far. On Thursday, July 16th, SpaceX attempted to lift off from their brand new launchpad at Starbase, Texas, but were only able to ignite the Superheavy booster for about 1 second before everything was abruptly shut down and the rocket stayed put on the ground. Now, we've never seen anything like that before. So, it was a little confusing and the confusion spread to Wall Street where SpaceX stock quickly dropped like a rock. That gives us a new insight into how the general public is measuring the success or failure of the company. And seeing a large group of investors immediately dump their stock based on a minor technical difficulty indicates that the learning curve with this industry is going to be steep. For the record, what we saw last week was actually a very impressive test of the Starship's pad abort system. And the fact that they were able to do a hard shutdown on 29 rocket engines without anything blowing up is actually a good sign.
SpaceX confirmed that the rocket was grounded because four of the 33 engines failed to ignite. Now, because Starship has so many engines, it actually doesn't need all of them to lift off. It can deal with two engines out at launch, but any more than that, and the computer automatically shuts the whole thing down. The problem was eventually traced back to the engine's liquid oxygen pump where they found that some trapped moisture had frozen when the cryogenic fuel hit the pump. Then the ice got jammed up inside and stopped the flow. This led SpaceX to replace six of the boosters engines before finally returning to the launchpad on Thursday, July 23rd, where it again had a launch scheduled and eventually called off. This time because of weather, but not in the way that you might think. Starship is designed to launch multiple times per day, every day, from multiple locations around the world. So, it can't be held back by a few clouds, and it won't be. SpaceX confirmed that they could actually launch Starship into a lightning storm if they wanted to. But in this case, they still need visibility from the ground to observe the ship during ascent. So, clouds would have messed with their testing data.
So, all of that explains how we end up with Flight 13 launching on a Friday night. But when they were finally ready to go, things happened fast. It still blows my mind that SpaceX is able to fully fuel this humongous rocket in just 30 minutes. That would have been considered impossible just a few years ago, but now it's just business as usual. And this new version of Starship gets off the ground in a hurry. Instead of easing in by lighting up a few engines at a time, they just floor it and burn all 33 all at once. So, even compared to previous Starships, this one really jumps off the launchpad. This rapid acceleration has a downside, though. It means that the rocket is moving faster at a lower altitude where the air is still dense. So, the maximum pressure it experiences is even higher than before. This is why SpaceX wanted to be able to see the rocket clearly from the ground. They are looking to spot any heat shield tiles that get knocked off by the air pressure.
But Starship powers through the ascent with no issues. And we get one very cool new camera angle. The one is actually inside the booster engine bay. And we're getting close-up views of the Raptor engines as they burn through the upper atmosphere. You can see these pieces of engines literally glowing red hot near the top. Those are the pre-burners. Since the Raptor engine is a staged combustion cycle, they actually ignite the fuel twice. Once in the pre-burner to power the turbo pumps and then again in the combustion chamber. So, even though these engines look like they're under a lot of stress, they are easily pushing the rocket up to stage separation.
This is where things started going wrong on our previous attempt, flight 12. But this time around, we got a much improved separation with the booster flipping straight up and performing the most powerful boost back burn. we've ever seen. The idea is that the rocket needs to slow down so it can start falling back toward the launch site. They used to do this by lighting up 13 of the booster engines, but this time around, we got a full 33 engine boost back, essentially slamming on the brakes. And that just means that the booster doesn't have to travel as far because it starts heading home a lot faster.
Now, in this case, the target wasn't all the way back to the launch site. The booster was aiming to land on the water just a few miles off the coast and demonstrate a soft splashdown just to prove that everything works before they return to catching rockets with their giant chopstick arms. And that is where we get our first surprise of the night. As the booster falls back toward the ocean, it's supposed to restart 13 engines for a landing burn that slows it from supersonic speed all the way down to the point where the rocket just kind of hovers above the ground. Instead, the booster was only able to restart nine engines at first, which then quickly dropped to eight and then just five engines remained as it quickly approached the surface of the ocean and the video feed cut off with the image of a fireball rising up from below. So, we can deduce that it slammed into the water like a flaming javelin. And honestly, it is surprising to me that SpaceX is still having reliability issues with this with their Raptor engines. They are now on the third version of an engine that they've been testing for over 6 years, and the failure rate is still pretty high. This booster did last longer than the one on Flight 12, though, so that is an improvement. But they used to be able to catch these things with a giant robot arm, and right now we're still pretty far from getting back to that point.
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Getting back to our Starship, we were fortunate to see that the upper stage had successfully ignited all six engines and was powering itself into a suborbital trajectory that would take it most of the way around the world. This sets us up for the most important Starship payload demonstration so far. The upper stage was loaded with 20 Starlink V3 satellites. not mass simulators or dummies like last time. These are the very first of Starlink's next generation internet satellites. With V3, they are hoping to achieve up to 1 TB per second of down link speed and each satellite is equipped with six laser communicators that will eventually create a high bandwidth connection between any two points anywhere on the Earth and eventually that will extend to the moon as well. We've just learned that NASA is installing Starlink laser transmitters on their Orion spacecraft that will be used for Artemis 3 in 2027 to stream live 4K video from space.
So, just like we've seen before, the Starship PEZ dispenser was able to launch satellites out through a small door on the back of the ship, but this time each of those Starlinks was able to power and begin transmitting data back to the ground. The main goal for this batch was to observe the starship itself, which means that each satellite was equipped with a flashlight to help illuminate things while flying around the night side of the Earth. So, we get this really cool effect of being able to see detail on the ship, even in the dark and this little cluster of lights in the distance, looking like UFOs.
Now, we've seen many Starships re-enter the atmosphere and come down for an ocean landing. But this latest flight managed to deliver an ending that we've never seen before. Typically, the stress from re-entry takes a heavy toll on the ship. It gets heated to thousands of degrees and then beat up by the stress of flying through the air. It's always been impressive that so many ships have been able to relight their engines and complete a landing burn. But the one thing that they all do after reaching the ocean is immediately tip over and explode. So, it was an extremely pleasant surprise when the ship came in for a very soft splashdown, slowly tipped over, and then started to float. Now, it was on fire a little bit, but that all burnt out pretty quickly, and we were left with this rocket just bobbing up and down on the waves.
That gave us the opportunity to get some very close-up detailed shots of the heat shield tiles after re-entry. And you can really see just how well everything held up. There is a lot of white scattered around. That's the insulation layer that sits right underneath the tiles and fills in the gaps between them. It's just getting spread out by the force of the atmosphere. But the actual heat shield itself looks to be completely undamaged. Now, it's hard to say exactly what the next step is going to be, but it looks like SpaceX is actually going to be able to recover this ship in one piece. They typically send out this recovery vessel to pick up scraps. But in theory, as long as the rocket continues to float, they have a shot at towing the whole thing back to Australia, and that would give SpaceX more data than they've ever had before about what happens to a Starship after going through outer space and re-entering the atmosphere.
All of this puts us in a really good position for Flight 14. We are closer than ever to seeing a Starship actually going to a full orbit, but the question of reliability and reusability still remains a problem. They need to get back to catching boosters and reflying them before they'll have any hope of doing the same with a ship. That means we need to see a clean booster return on the next flight test. The good news is that the rocket for flight 14 is already waiting at Starbase, so it shouldn't be long until we get to see what comes next. I imagine that we'll be doing this again in August. And if you want to make sure you don't miss a single Starship update, sign up for the Space Race newsletter by clicking the link below right now.