SpaceX's Starship Literally Melted! But It Kept Flying To A Miraculous Landing!

hello it's Scott Manley here it has been an absolutely astonishingly exciting morning as SpaceX launched Starship for the fourth time if4 and we already knew that this was going to be a different flight from previous ones because of changes to the inflight timeline but we all hoped to see that it would get further through the booster and the Starship recovery the ink was barly dry on the launch license when the time and date was confirmed I ended up getting up at 5 a.m. so I could watch it and listen to it 6 5 4 3 2 I have no idea what that Screech was but it sounded like something demonic being Unleashed notably after 100% success on the previous two flights one of the engines shut down almost immediately after takeoff and also watch those pressure waves heading out to sea here it is slowed down with a contrast turned up I think this is actually um you know water vapor appearing in the rare faction part of these pressure waves it was pretty humid similarly watch this angle as it passes the sun you get light getting refracted by those pressure waves those are the hard edged shock waves that create the rocket crackle sound that we hear and then as it ascends through a cloud layer we also see concentric waves heading outwards and this is the high pressure wave causing the cloud to disappear and the low pressure is where the cloud gets enhanced this is the same thing that causes vapor cones around jets that are flying close to the speed of sound so anyway as I said we knew that there would be changes for this Mission first of all the launch license now allowed for a number of potential failure conditions which would not be would require a mishap investigation so if the spacecraft burned up on re-entry due to a failure of thermal protection system that was going to be acceptable because this was a test of that system it's not that SpaceX wouldn't investigate it they were after the data but it wouldn't hold up a potential a future launch license and there were a couple of important changes to the timeline of the flight first of all after stage separation and the Boost back they were going to intentionally drop the uh hot staging ring that is the big Shield that sits between the two stages to protect the the booster stage from the hard rocket exhaust generated by Starship during separation and there's a couple of reasons they wanted to do this first of all the booster has got heavier this was an earlier booster design they've since reinforced it they've added more stringers and it's put on a lot of weight which means that their Landing uh margin their fuel margin has been cut into so by getting rid of that extra weight they can actually test it through the landing and make sure it's controllable but also it's believ that the hot staging ring separated during a highly dynamic in uh moment during re-entry and contributed to the loss of control of the booster on flight three so while a fully reusable booster is the goal they wanted to just ditch this so they could test it through the entirety of the flight envelope another critical change for this flight is there was not going to be attempt to relight the engine in Flight that means they are pushing out the goal of demonstrating deorbit capability to say flight five at the earliest instead the focus was going to be on maintaining attitude during the entire flight uh so that they could you know go into re-entry with a stable vehicle orientation and test those flaps those control surfaces during the re-entry process while the control flaps had been demonstrated during previous flights of Starship they had never been demonstrated at Hypersonic speeds and that was going to be a big question anyway at this point in Flight the booster is depleted almost all its Propel and it's time to separate these and we have this wonderful ballet I don't know the show as the engines shut down one by one the engines on the second stage light up we see this beautiful separation event the backflip the engines lighting again as the booster begins to head for home it wants to bring itself back off the coast of bokach chica not too close but close enough in that they would be able to demonstrate that they could get back they had the capacity to get there once they have demonstrated the capability of soft Landing this look at the booster on the left look at how little propellant it actually has left now that it's lost most of the mass it's able to actually make big changes to its velocity and start heading for home now of course eventually the plan is to catch these boosters using the tower which sounds crazy but this is what they want to do to you know reduce the need for landing legs at this moment SpaceX has been clearing out parts of star base they've cleared out the old Starship launch test stands so that they can build another launch Tower and I think that they're going to wait until they are well into building the second launch Tower if not completing the second launch Tower before they are going to attempt to catch at this point it's headed to the Gulf of Mexico and we just want to know how fast it'll end up Landing uh now at this point the jettison the hot staging ring the heat shield on the front that's probably about 10 tons of stainless steel yeah again it's going to land pretty close to the booster but presumably not close enough that it will end up having any chance of interacting with it on the way down remember the shield was not built into the booster originally it was uh you know built afterwards and then attached using the staging clamps which were designed to hold Starship in place so it just became an extra insert and for good measure we did get a shot of the top of the booster with the original hardware and if you watch on the right you can see a grid actuator move it's headed straight downwards at over four times the speed of sound and the as the atmosphere gets thicker it's going to start interacting with those grid fins so this is where it's going to start trying to maintain control during The Descent the atmosphere is starting to get thicker while it is falling under the force of gravity it hits Peak speed at about 25 km and starts to decelerate remember this comes down much faster than a falcon 9 booster it doesn't need an entry burn and around km up it hits Peak deceleration at about 5.1 G and again just look at the tiny propellant reserves in lower tank there is actually a header tank to store the the propellant but for the upper tank most of the propellant literally sits inside the the plumbing the piping that goes down and now the Moment of Truth engines relight and we see one engine fail with pieces flying past the other engines have to throttle harder to decelerate we get 5.1 Peak G deceleration we're down to three engines now for the final Landing burn slow deceleration till just above the water and a soft touchdown at which point the booster has done its Mission it's demonstrated control ability and it falls over into the Gulf of Mexico and any trapped gases catch fire but this is a huge Victory they've demonstrated that they can actually bring the booster down to a slow descent rate just above the sea now we don't know how accurately they did this that will be something that SpaceX will have to figure out and if they know that they were able to get it to within but like one meter of where they expected that will be surely a good sign that they can actually begin to proceed towards a potential Tower catch test in the future meanwhile around the same time the second stage shuts down the vacuum engines leaves just the three sea level Raptors to steer it onto its final trajectory and then those get shut down right at the end it is in a suborbital trajectory where it will come down over the Indian Ocean just to the west of Australia and that's where the re-entry is going to happen so based on the burnout velocity and the Appo of 213 km which is reached about 25 minutes after launch uh that looks like its per was still inside the earth maybe about you know 10 kilometers below the surface so it was you know orbital velocity but in an orbit which was intentionally designed to come back to the Earth and then for the next half hour there wasn't really that much to see there was actually a few images which were taken by ground stations in Florida showing an entire Starship rather than half a Starship from if2 but we basically lost video for most of the flight we did have Telemetry but no actual video from any public cameras and that's led to speculation that there may have been a secret payload or something going on there and if there it was I hope that payload is happy being on a suborbital trajectory that brought it back into the ocean so yeah the main attraction the main excitement would come 42 minutes later so we had two cameras for this first of all it was on the leeward side looking forwards to the right uh fin the right flap you can see the heat shield on the left with the the tiles and some of the backing material there also if you look you can actually see some like things sticking out the back of that fin I can't say for sure what they but if it was an aircraft those would be static Wicks that are designed to remove static electricity as it flies forwards uh that interferes with communication systems but this only spends a small amount of time in the atmosphere they might be temperature probes there was another camera which is on the left Fin and it is pointing backwards so we see two of the fins and so I'm just going to run this at about four times regular speed because the initial part of the re-entry takes quite a long time uh there's the believe that's the coast of Madagascar I could be wrong but it does fly over Africa and then I think south of Madagascar so remember this is supposed to be a controlled re-entry the idea is that they're going to use aerodynamic lift on the Starship to keep it up at a higher altitude than it would otherwise do on a ballistic trajectory and so this stops IT falling down now you can begin to see the initial glow as it's starting to hit the rarified upper atmosphere they're still up at 100 km above the Caron line but you can see that this thing hitting into even that very tenuous atmosphere is compressing it enough that it is glowing now the other thing you can see is that it's going into nighttime this was intentionally going to re-enter in the dark and it looks like there might have been an aircraft roughly in the area that might have been able to see some of this stuff and so at this point 90 km up it's reached roughly its maximum speed and it's starting to feel the drag of the atmosphere slow it down again it is still descending but as that as it gets lower that drag starts to build up and it's able to convert some of that drag into lift that will keep it from falling further down too quickly you can see how the uh you know how the glow has changed colors as it's got deeper and deeper and the uh your plasma is getting denser and denser and of course if you look in the top right you see views by starlink Starship is the first vehicle that has had the capab ability to send this kind of footage live out of the re-entry plasma that usually blocks radio transmission it's big enough that it creates a hole in the plasma that the radio waves can transmit backwards to satellites the space shuttle was able to get Telemetry out but this is live video and this is just absolutely beautiful and note when the angle changes that's the fin moving to adjust the aerodynamic drag and maintain control during this re-entry entry sequence this is the first vehicle to demonstrate this kind of control mechanism at Hypersonic speeds not only is it maintaining attitude with the heat shield facing towards the flow it's also again able to generate lift now there's another thing I haven't mentioned at this point there was one small change to this uh Starship one intentional change because we've previously lost uh tiles on flights and actually Elon Musk recently said we're not sure how you know how Rob this heat shield is we know that our areas if we lose a tile we lose the ship so there are three tiles that were missing off the rear skirt area and we didn't expect that would be such a big problem because if they did burn through in that region the first thing it would do would hit a vacuum Raptor and then it would have to burn through that before it actually got to the sea level Raptors so anyway at this point the drag is becoming important we're actually starting to see Sparks that is there is material coming off from various places and that is burning up small Sparks are fine that's just you know rough edges getting knocked off the heat shield and we expected a bit of that but as it gets more intense uh we begin to realize that there is potentially a problem in places uh in particular these fins they have to move and we know that means there has to be a hinge and that means that there has to be a gap to allow the parts to move over each other and right there behind that fin you can see uh what looks like possibly some trapped gas maybe coming through that to me looks like hot gas coming in through the hinge and then ex exiting out the back of the hinge remember during re-entry the heat doesn't come from the friction of the air it comes because the air is being compressed by the body moving through it high pressure air is going to flow into any Gap that it can find until it escapes via a low press route and it's going to carry any heat with it on the space shuttle the elevons went straight backwards but in this case the fins are more or less sticking out the side so that Gap is there for the air to flow into and as we switch over to another angle you can actually see the gas is coming up through that Gap there and I'm pretty sure I heard an audible groan from the the SpaceX audience in the background when they saw this happening so now over the next few minutes this camera has the best view you can see the inside of that fin is just getting eaten Away by that hot gas and I expect it's not the only one because from the other angle we also saw similar Hot Gas excursions and that was from a rear Fin and as we wonder how long it's going to survive there was very much a reaction from the SpaceX audience there he is looks like we got the flap starting to come apart a little so yeah we're watching this live and we're now thinking okay how long till this loses control because it's using these flaps to guide and control its descent and once these are lost if they either break off or they lose too much stuff or they maybe get jammed this spacecraft is going to ultimately lose control it's either going to end up going nose first or rear first or spinning whatever if it's unable to maintain attitude it is not going to make a soft touchdown and as we're seeing that stainless steel just disintegrate and those heat shield tiles like fall off the vaporized metals are starting to coat the camera lens and while we are getting great data from starlink we are getting crappy imagery from the cameras because of all the material deposited on the lens at this point it's lost over half its orbital velocity it's still moving twice as fast as the X15 ever did it's down at 52 km but we don't really know what's happening out there what we can see is the direction of material coming off is still going from the left to the right and that was showing that it was me maintaining attitude also I think around yeah this is the point where we actually crack the material and that actually opens up a tiny window through which you can see Sparks and those Sparks are all going the right direction which is confirming the Telemetry down below that's showing that while this is disintegrating well this is breaking up it is still maintaining control it is stricken but it is continuing it's like Anakin Skywalker flying half a spaceship still I was saying to myself it's over this thing is going to lose control right without that control it's going to end up in the wrong attitude it's going to be unable to perform the transition from uh the belly flop into the flip because it will be spinning or whatever I am frankly amazed that the control system was able to adapt to this but miraculously yeah it holds control it gets down to you know Supersonic and then to subsonic speeds it's at 60,000 feet and it's descending at less than Mark 1 it is nose down I thought at this point it was going to go nose down but no control system gets back it figures out what's going on and it is targeting itself it gets into a nice horizontal position and of course it's night time so we don't actually see that much I do actually wonder where the light is coming from here because it's not supposed to have its engines lit at this altitude but uh eventually yeah it gets down it's moving at 360 it's moving like 200 knots straight down in the belly flop position and then it has to perform that magic belly flop and turn and land we didn't know whether the engines would relight at this point well we were about to find out and it looks like everything worked we see the engines light up we see the flaps the fins moving into a new position it looks like it slows down to you know basically a stop over the water and then shuts down the Eng we see a bit of a splash coming up in the background and as it falls over we catch just the hint of the water you know finally you know putting this thing down on its side you know congratulations holy moly what a success I mean this is just really an amazing example of adaptable software the hardware was failing in ways which they may have anticipated but the Control software was able to adapt was able to measure the changes to the vehicle's aerodynamics and its responses to the flat motions and therefore the software was able to successfully maintain control even as the hardware around it it was failing again this has delivered absolutely unique sites that we have never seen in space flight before if Starship had failed at this point it would have been totally acceptable it would have been a stunning thing to see but to actually have Starship get all the way down and succeed is just it's mindblowing and wow I can't wait to see flight number five I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

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Id: 8m0TY6i1Kuo

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024