Wow! Watch SpaceX Starship re-enter Earth's atmosphere in these incredible views

Behind this, there are some of those great Starlink

views

that give us video

views

aboard Starships, so we're hoping that Starlink on board will allow us, just as we're

watch

ing these videos now, to see through that plasma field . maintaining a continuous communication lock with satellites in orbit through the wake left by Starship Now, this is only the second time we've tested Starlink during re-entry, so although we now have these great images, don't be surprised. If we can overcome some signal issues, we're still learning what that wake will actually look like in practice and whether we'll be able to get that continuous high-speed live data during re-entry.

Yes, that's right and one of the really primary ones. The reasons we want to use Starlink is simply to collect as much data as possible. Data has been said to be the payload on one of these flights. Where we are, we're just putting this flight hardware in a real flight environment trying to learn about. To the extent possible, re-entry will be a truly critical phase of the flight. We really want to know how the ship is going to perform, especially that heat shield as we go through hypersonic re-entry, so if something were to go wrong during this re-entry, we want as many routes as possible to collect that information, that data just to get back to continuously feed the St the Starship program to make each flight more reliable, a more successful acquisition, only marous now if Starship manages to reach re-entry it will collect valuable data on Starship flying through Earth's

atmosphere

at hypersonic speeds, which which means more than five or at this point it will be more than five times the speed of sound now that we're looking at these live views.

Viewed in HD apparently thanks to Starlink. You can see that the ship's flaps could be activating. Certainly some

incredible

glimpses of planet Earth behind Starship. We have now validated the ship's ability to fly and land. at subsonic speeds, you might remember those suborbital flights from a few years ago and we can see those flaps there, so getting data on things like heating and control while we're traveling much faster than before will be critical to eventually bringing back the space spaceships. for rapid reuse, so I mentioned those fins, which are one of the things that allow Starship to help control itself and survive the heat of reentry which, as we said before, we expect reentry to happen around t plus4 49 minutes, so we're getting pretty close here and what you're seeing here looks like the vehicle is moving back and forth.

Part of what you're also seeing is one of the cameras, this onboard view that we have. it's on the end of a fin Starship has front and rear fins on the vehicle so we have four of those and oh man we can see the heating on those fins as we begin to re-

enter

Earth's

atmosphere

. This is where Earth's atmosphere is doing the work to slow us down. Now, as we said, this plasma field, wow, what a view we hope to maintain. These views across Starship are so large that we hope the plasma field doesn't. It doesn't completely cover the entire vehicle at this point, not that the Starlinks are brought to you by Starink, yes the Starlinks are still communicating and still capturing the data and video that we see here.

I mean Shiva, these are absolutely

incredible

views we've had. I've never seen anything like this before, this is the largest flying object ever in absolutely K space and it's important to note that the climb we made was to take us to orbital speeds even though we were on a near orbital trajectory, so what the heating and the loads that Starship is going through right now or what it would receive if it were recovering from an orbital mission and the just fact that we've seen through the entrance this is incredible, yeah, again, This is the farthest and fastest Starship has ever been. ever flown and you can definitely tell from the crowd here in Haw by the hot and cold tiles doing their job, we talked about it before, until 2600 fahit that those hot and cold tiles are dissipating as we go back to

enter

, yes, now this. was one of the critical or rather key objectives of the mission that we hoped to achieve today, we have never done it, as I said, because this is the fastest and the furthest that Starship has flown, so this is the first time that we got to Collect this re-entry data and understand how these 18,000 hexagonal heat shield plates work together to protect Starship's belly as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere.

Again, the atmosphere is doing us a big favor here because the atmosphere is actually doing us a big favor here by acting as a braking system for Starship, um, when it re-enters the atmosphere and that's part of the reason why which flaps are so important. We are using Starship's body and the resistance of the atmosphere to slow down. We go down from orbital speed, but you want the vehicle to remain stable, you want those heat shield plates to point downward, so they can absorb heat from the Earth's atmosphere, and that's the purpose they serve during that phase hypersonic and then again during the subsonic phase absolutely, as we said, these views are being provided by a couple of sterlink terminals that are located on Starship as the plasma builds it, we hope to be able to bring you these views, but you can see.

Telemetry is on the right side of your screen. If you look closely, you can see that the speed slows down again. That is the friction of the atmosphere, which results in this plasma field. Sorry, the blanket, which is potentially blocking the Sterling terminals. Now, we'll bring them back to you if we get them, but right now for those of you who have recently joined, Starship is re-entering Earth's atmosphere, this is super exciting because it's the furthest and fastest Starship has ever flown. It's just amazing a major test, Milestone, something that we wanted to accomplish on Flight 2, get to it today, so just amazing now that we have some heat shields here, so these are the ones that are doing all the work on Starship in this At the moment, there are 18,000 hexagonal heat shields. like these, so this one I have is flat, that's what you would put on the Starship flaps, whereas the Shiva has something a little different.

Yes, the one I have would be on the curved surfaces of Starship. I'll just put it. on the frame here, so we have them attached at various points around the vehicle, like you said Kate, 18,000 of these tiles around and they're doing the work to make sure that the structure of the vehicle doesn't take all that thermal loading, so eventually we can recover the vehicles and reuse them quickly. They are very light. They sound a little different than I would have expected, but they are ceramic. And this is what is helping Starship survive through this. entry period um we're not sure how far we're going to go again this is the furthest we've gone on our test flight but the further we fly the more data we can get and that's ultimately the Measure of success here, what I mean, I think today was a great success given where we've gone and how far we've come with both the booster and Starship.