The ship did all along the start of the school year, turned to a horizontal position to descend through dispersed clouds, then release three of its engines to return to a vertical orientation for the final braking maneuver before splashing.
Things to improve
There are several dishes to remember from Tuesday flight which will require improvements to Starship, but these are more like the managers could expect from a rocket test program and not the catastrophic failures of the ship that occurred earlier this year.
One of the 33 Super Heavy Booster engines stopped prematurely during the ascent. This has happened before, and even if it did not affect the overall performance of the booster, engineers will study failure to try to improve the reliability of the SpaceX raptor engines, everyone can generate more than half a million pushing books.
Later in the flight, cameras pointed at one of the rear shutters of the ship showed structural damage at the rear of the wing. It is not known what caused the damage, but the super heated plasma burned part of the shutter while the ship is more deepened in the atmosphere. However, the component remained largely intact and was able to help control the vehicle thanks to reintegration and radiance.
“We are a little mean to this stars a little,” said Huot on the live broadcast of SpaceX. “We really try to put him to the test and to point out what some of his weak points are.”
Small pieces of debris were also visible peeling the ship during the start of the school year. The origin of the brilliant debris was not immediately clear, but it may have been part of the ship’s thermal shield tiles. On this flight, SpaceX has tested several conceptions of different tiles, including ceramic and metallic materials, and a design of tiles that uses “active cooling” to help dissipate heat during reintegration.
A bright flash inside the ship’s engine bay during the start of the school year also seemed to damage the rear skirt of the vehicle, the stainless steel structure that surrounds the six main engines of the rocket.
“This is not what we want to see,” said Huot. “We have just seen part of the rear skirt take a hit. So we have visible damage on the rear skirt. We continue to come back, however. We intentionally stress the ship while we are crossing this, it is therefore not guaranteed to be a smooth journey towards the Indian Ocean.
“We have deleted a bunch of tiles in a kind of critical places through the vehicle, so seeing things like that is still precious for us,” he said. “We are trying to push this vehicle to the limits to find out what its limits are when we design our next version of Starship.”
Shana Diez, a starship engineer at SpaceX, may have summarized Tuesday’s results on X: “It’s not an easy year, but we finally got the back-to-school data that is so essential to Starship. It’s good to be back!”
