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

behind it um there's some of those great views from uh from starlink giving us uh views of Starships onboard videos and so we're hoping that the starlink on board will let us just like we're seeing these videos now see through that plasma field by maintaining a continuous communication lock with the satellites on orbit through the Wake that Starship leaves behind now this is only the second time that we're testing starlink during re-entry so even though we do have these great visuals now uh don't be surprised if we manage to get some signal hiccups through we're still learning about what that wake will actually look like in practice and whether we're able to get that live continuous highspeed data during re-entry yeah that's right and one of the really primary reasons we want to use starlink is to just gather as much data as possible it's been said the data is the payload on one of these flights um where we're just we're putting this flight Hardware in a real flight environment trying to learn about it as much as possible uh re-entry is going to be a really critical phase of flight uh we really want to know how the ship's going to perform especially that heat shield as we're going through the Hypersonic re-entry so if something were to go wrong during this re-entry we want as many paths as possible to collect that information that data just to again just continually feed back uh into St the Starship program to make each flight more reliable more successful acquisition single marous now if Starship manages to make it all the way through re-entry will collect valuable data on Starship flying through the Earth's atmosphere at Hypersonic speeds meaning uh more than five or at this point will be more than five times the speed of sound now we're watching these live views uh HD views by the looks of it thanks to starlink uh you can see that the flaps there on the ship might be actuating um certainly some incredible uh visions of planet Earth behind Starship now uh we've already validated starship's ability to fly uh and land at subsonic speeds you might recall those suborbital flights from a few years ago and we can see those flaps there so getting data on aspects like Heating and control while traveling way faster than we did before is going to be critical to eventually bringing Starships back from space for Rapid reuse so I mentioned those flaps that's one of the things um that that enables Starship to help control itself and and and survive the heat of re-entry which like we said before we're expecting that re-entry to occur around t plus4 49 minutes uh so we're uh getting pretty close here and what you're seeing here it looks like the vehicle is sort of moving back and forth part of what you're also seeing is one of the cameras this onboard view that we have is on the end of a flap Starship has front flaps and and rear flaps in the vehicle um so we've got four of those and oh man we can see the heating on those flaps as we're starting to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere this is where the Earth's atmosphere is doing the work to slow us down um now like we said this plasma field wow is wow what a view we hope to maintain these views throughout Starship is so big that we're hoping that the plasma field doesn't entirely blanket the entire vehicle right now it is not the starlinks are brought to you by starink yeah the starlinks are still communicating and still uh capturing the data and the video that we see here I mean Shiva this is just absolutely incredible views we've never seen anything like this before this is the the biggest flying object ever in space absolutely K and and it's important to note with the ascent burn that we did was to get us to orbital velocities even though we were on a nearly orbital trajectory so the heating and the loads that Starship is going through right now or what it would be getting if it were recovering from an orbital Mission and and just the fact that we have viewed through entry this is incredible yeah again this is the furthest and fastest that Starship has has ever flown and you can definitely tell by the uh the crowd here in Haw for the heat chill tiles doing their work we talked about it earlier uh up to 2600 de fahit that those heat chill tiles are dissipating as we are re-entering yeah now this was one of the critical or rather the key uh mission objectives that we were hoping to hit today uh we have never like I said for this is the fastest and furthest that Starship has ever flown so this is the first time that we're getting to collect this re-entry data and understand how these 18,000 hexagonal heat shield tiles are working together to protect the belly of Starship as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere uh once again the the atmosphere is doing us a big favor here by the atmosphere is actually doing us a huge favor here by acting as a breaking system for Starship um as it re-enters the atmosphere and that's part of the reason why the flaps are so important we're using the body of Starship and the drag from the atmosphere to slow us down from orbital speed but you want the vehicle to remain stable you want those heat shield tiles pointed down uh so they can absorb the heat of the Earth's atmosphere um and so that's the purpose that they are serving during that Hypersonic phase and then again during the subsonic phase absolutely so like we said these views are being provided by uh a couple sterlink terminals that are are positioned uh on Starship itself as that plasma builds it we're hoping that we can bring these views back to you uh but you can see the Telemetry there on the right hand side of your screen um if you watch closely you can see the speed decelerating again that's the friction um of the atmosphere resulting in this plasma field excuse me the blanket um that is uh potentially blocking the the Sterling terminals right now so we'll bring those back to you if we get them but right now for those of you that have recently joined uh Starship is currently re-entering Earth's atmosphere this is super exciting because it's the furthest and fast fastest that Starship has ever flown it's just absolutely incredible major test Milestone something we wanted to accomplish on flight 2 getting to it today so just awesome now we actually have some heat shields here so these are what's doing all the work on Starship right now uh there are 18,000 hexagonal uh heat shields like these uh so this one that I have is flat like this is what would be positioned on the flaps of Starship whereas Shiva has something a little different yeah the the one I have would be on the curved surfaces of Starship I'll just put it in frame here so we've got these 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 carry all that thermal load so we can recover the vehicles eventually and and get to Rapid reuse on them they're really lightweight uh they they sound um a little different than I would have expected them to but they are ceramic um and these are are what's helping Starship uh survive through this period of Entry um we're not sure how far we're going to make it again this is the furthest that we've gotten uh in our test flight but the further we fly the more data that we can get and that's ultimately uh the measure of success here which I mean I think today has been a huge success given where we uh where we've gone and how much further we've gotten with both the booster and Starship

Channel: VideoFromSpace

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Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024