on today's episode SpaceX has done the impossible yet again so we're talking about everything that happened on starship's latest test flight the aftermath of a historic rocket landing and what this all means for Starship going forward unlike prior Starship launches flight 5 didn't go right at the top of the launch window which is 700 a.m. local time the flight was delayed by boats in the Gulf of Mexico down range from the launch site which is pretty standard for rocket launches BAS basically you can't have anything in the water underneath the Rocket's flight path for obvious
safety reasons you never know what might fall from the sky luckily the boers were cleared away in time to make the launch window which was only open for 30 minutes and at 7:25 a.m. the super heavy booster number 12 and Starship number 30 lifted off from Starbase Texas at this point launching a Starship is pretty textbook the only outlier would be that first flight number one and luckily that seems to have been an isolated incident at t plus 2 minutes 42 seconds we get the hot stage separation this is always very cool to see most
of the boosters 33 Raptor engines shut down while at the same time six engines on the Starship upper stage are ignited SpaceX capitalizes on all of that energy from the ship engines to push the booster away and into a backflip maneuver as the super heavy comes around it's ignited 13 Center engines and begun the process of slowing down from a velocity of over 5,000 kmph this is the Boost back burn at this moment back on the ground something very interesting is happening thousands of system checks are being carried out on both the super heavy itself
and the tower that just launched it the ground crew needs to be sure that every system is functional and ready to try something insane as the booster engines shut down it's coasted to an altitude of 96 kilomet and with the booster starting to freefall back to Earth we get confirmation that the tower is go for catch back at the launch site there is a massive Tower named mechazilla with its Chopstick Arms Wide Open waiting to receive an incoming super heavy booster the Chopstick arms are two triangular metal truss structures each with its own large hydraulic
piston that allows them to open and close independently the Chopsticks are anchored to a sort of rail car that can run up and down the length of the tower on tracks with the vertical movement being controlled by a cable system with a powerful electric winch at the base we've seen these arms used many times in the past to lift the Starship and superheavy but they were also designed to catch these Rockets as well which again is insane even for SpaceX turning back to our booster as it falls through the atmosphere we're seeing these big puffs
of gas shooting out from the bottom as far as I know these are bursts of compressed CO2 that are being used to purge all of the excess methane gas that might have built up and been trapped in the engine section of the super heavy when the booster finally drops down through the clouds and gets picked up by the ground tracking camera we can see how much heat has built up at the base of the rocket it's just moved from the very thin atmosphere into higher densities of air while traveling at speeds over 4,000 km per
hour not nearly as intense as an atmospheric re-entry from orbit but it's still literally glowing red hot now the booster is coming in at a pretty aggressive angle of attack it's being steered by four aerodynamic grid fins at the top that rotate using electric motors and there's also lift being generated by four chines that run vertical along the base of the rocket these aerodynamic control surfaces are all helping to direct the booster in towards the catch Tower at an altitude of about 1 km and traveling at the speed of sound the super Heavy's 13 Center
engines relight and begin an incredibly powerful Landing burn this only lasts for a few seconds but it kills off the majority of the booster's air speed something I thought was really cool as the middle ring engines shut down you can see that the gimbal mechanisms also push the nozzles outwards and away from the center three Raptors that remain lit which probably gives the center cluster more range of motion as it begins to steer the booster into its final Landing trajectory up until now the booster wasn't actually being steered towards the tower it was pointed at
an area just ahead of the Launchpad towards the beach which presents a nice wide area for the booster to crash land and explode without damaging any of the critical ground systems which is exactly what would have happened if there had been any significant failure with the engine Rel light but in this case all systems are go to make the final course correction into the waiting arms of mechazilla the booster is roughly 100 m above the tower when the base of the rocket pitches over at an angle towards the sea and then quickly swings back to
the tower like a pendulum just above the Chopstick arms it's still falling at around 60 km per hour which is about 40 m hour or typical Street traffic speed as the booster slides down through the arms it begins to straighten out while the Chopsticks close in there is so much going on here in just a few seconds thankfully SpaceX was able to include some alternate angles for us to see all of the details but the most important thing to keep your eye on are these two little pins on the side of the booster and the
two Thin rails of metal on the inner edge of the Chopsticks the catch points on the booster are located just below the grid fins they're two metal cylinders on either side of the rocket and each is just a bit more than 6 in across they have to come down directly on the catch rails which are only a little bit wider than the pins this means that the orientation of the booster has to be very precise in terms of roll if it comes in spun a little bit too far clockwise or counterclock wise then the catch
is not going to be successful on the Inside Edge of the catch rail is some foam padding it's going to allow the Chopstick to come in tight on the booster and slap it from both sides without causing any damage and that will make sure that the pin comes down directly on top of the rail below the padding on the underside of the catch rail is a set of shock absorbers this allows the Chopstick rig to cradle the weight of the booster just a little bit there's only a couple feet of travel in there but it
should be enough so when we see the booster start to tuck in below the Chopsticks all of these final alignments need to happen very fast as soon as the chines of the booster are clear the sticks can begin to clamp down and we actually see that each arm is moving independently here the left side comes in first and then the right then they move together to pinch the rocket just a few meters below the catch pins at this moment the booster engines are throttling down to gently drop the final meter as the pins hit the
rail the engine cut out and the full weight of the booster is cradled by the shock absorbers by all accounts this was a perfect success I don't think anyone honestly imagine things going any better than they actually did ever had a fun night out but the next morning just wasn't worth it well that used to be me until I discovered zbiotics pre- alcohol probiotic it's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic created by PhD scientists to help you bounce back the next day after a few Dr drinks here's how it works when you drink alcohol produces
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best after a night out head to zbiotics docomond back guarantee so you've got nothing to lose thank you to zbiotics for sponsoring this episode and helping us all feel better tomorrow many of us thought that for the first catch at least super heavy would come in much more slowly and maybe even hover in the air for a moment before the catch but the reality was just one smooth and fluent motion right down into the mechazilla one thing that you probably noticed was a slight excess of fire in the engine bay during and after the catch
procedure that's probably not ideal but it's probably not the worst thing ever I wouldn't say that the booster was on fire it's just that there was some fire around it and by that I mean there's still a lot of methane gas inside this rocket and it looks like the booster is actively trying to dump as much of that as it can in the final seconds of the flight you can see a ton of flaming gas being shot out from the quick disconnect point at the base of the rocket that's where the fuel goes in and
now it's rapidly coming back out again also when the engine's shut down we have to remember that the fuel pumps inside of them don't stop on a dime they keep spinning and that continues to dump more methane into the area that's already incredibly hot that's probably what we see burning and by the time the booster comes to a rest most of the fire has already died down the booster is clearly intact enough to later be lowered down onto the launch Mount shortly after flight Elon Musk wrote on X later that evening that he had inspected
booster 12 himself and that it's in great shape a few of the outer engine nozzles were warped from Heating and some other minor issues but these are easily addressed it's not 100% clear what Elon means by that but we can guess that the fixes he's talking about will come with the next upgrade to starship's engine the Raptor version 3 with that design SpaceX Engineers have moved almost all of the Raptor's Plumbing inside the metal casing of the engine itself so there are significantly fewer points where anything can leak out and there's even less stuff that
can potentially catch on fire the only visible damage on the booster postf flight is just a few steel panels missing this is a photo from Interstellar Gateway showing one of the chines inside is a pressurized tank this is one of the few pieces of Starship that isn't welded down so it's probably just a bad Fastener that resulted in this coming apart as Elon says the eventual goal with this booster is to make it rapidly reusable so ideally just 1 hour of downtime between landing and launching again which means that any amount of fire in the
engine bay is not going to work in the long term but fire suppression is the easy part compared to what we just watched now our attention turns to the ship stage throughout the return of the booster Starship has been powering its way to an altitude of 150 km at almost the same time that super heavy is caught the ship's engines shut down and begin a coast phase around the globe the ship's momentum will carry it to a maximum height of 212 km above the surface but the velocity of just over 26,000 kmph is not quite
enough to keep it in space for one full orbit around the Earth at t plus 46 minutes the ship begins to dip back down into the atmosphere and this is where the second Big Show of the morning begins there are three phases of re-entry the first is when the ship begins to encounter low drag from the upper atmosphere this is up around 90 km where the body of the ship is impacting air molecules at incredibly high speeds but the density of that air is so low that nothing much is going to happen we can see
that the hot gas is starting to build up underneath the ship but there's minimal effect on the velocity so far as the ship descends down it starts to encounter higher densities of gas and the energy released by impacting that gas with a very large object moving at a very high speed is going to create a lot of heat the gas is compressed to the point where it changes state into plasma which is that amazing color that we see build up underneath the ship this phase is called Peak Heating and it's going to last for about
10 minutes you might notice that once the ship gets down to an altitude of around 69 kilm per hour it kind of just stays up there for a long time the ship is using its body and flaps to create lift which is preventing it from falling deeper down into the dense atmosphere so it's losing a lot of velocity before it starts to encounter too much drag down below 60 km the ship is past the peak heating phase which sounds like we're out of the woods but it actually means that the real test has just begun
this third phase is high Dynamic pressure now in addition to incredibly high heat there is a rapidly increasing amount of physical resistance being encountered by the ship a few things to consider here this version of Starship has a new and improved heat shield that is being tested for the first time so in addition to the black hexagon tiles there's an underlying layer of protection that uses an ablative material ablation is just a fancy way to say melting or disintegrating which is what's happening when you see Sparks coming off of the ship SpaceX purposely removed a
few of the main tiles to expose the secondary heat shield for this flight just to see what would happen they also covered some of their regular tiles with an outer layer of alum aluminum from what I got they're using the exposed aluminum kind of like a thermometer we know what temperature aluminum melts at so the condition of that metal after the flight would give us an idea of the thermal environment it's been put through if there's still a ship to examine postf flight Starship flight 5 definitely fared better than its predecessor which lost the majority
of its front control flaps flight 5 did still experience some burn through at the hinge mechanism just not as much which shows that SpaceX is moving in the right direction it's important to note that this particular design of the Starship that we're watching right now is already an outdated model there's a version 2 ship that's already begun production back in the new Factory at Starbase and the biggest difference between V1 and V2 is the design of those forward flaps so I don't see this as anything to worry about right now if we're still getting burn
through around the flaps on Starship V2 then that might be a good time to panic down at around 40 km of altitude the ship has passed through the worst of it we can see that there is still a lot of heat and fire and sparks flying but we're intact and preparing for the next big event The Landing burn thankfully we get a much more clear view of the landing procedure this time around the engines relight the base of the ship flips down towards the water and we get what appears to be a soft touchdown then
the rocket begins to tip over and now we're definitely on fire though as SpaceX cuts to a surprise camera angle from a very nearby floating platform we can see the entire ship burst into flames and quickly nose dive the final image is the ship's tail bobbing and flaming just above the waves the good news is that the ship landed precisely On Target the bad news is we're not getting any opportunity to inspect what's left of it so what did we learn well the super heavy booster is definitely a recoverable rocket SpaceX can get it back
down to the ground in one piece but it's not reusable yet they've still got some work to do there while the ship is getting closer to recoverability it's going to be a much steeper Hill to climb and Starship V2 should solve many of the issues that we are seeing right now the next major milestone for this rocket system is going to be achieving a full orbit that means getting the ship up to an even higher velocity circling the earth and then performing a deorbit burn for a controlled re-entry potentially even deploying a load along the
way so there's still very much to come so stay tuned
