Official confirmation of the relight then. I wonder why it didn't show up on the telemetry?
They did leave two tiles off the aft end and put in a thinner tile. Possible that those spots burned through and damaged the sensors, but the sea-level engines were healthy enough to still work.
Yeah this seems likely. You could see from the altitude and speedometer (can't think of better word for it rn) that the rocket slowed down hovering for a short moment before accelerating again and falling into water.
Anyways, I'd be much more interested for spacex to release info on what wasn't as successful.
They're probably still poring over the data. Telemetry from the temperature sensors, the feeds from the internal cameras, data from the booster and why two of its engines failed and so on. Most likely also data on what and how many TPS tiles S29 lost on the way down, I doubt the video feeds were their only way of checking those All in all, it's gotta be terabytes of data to sort through and analyze
Yeah that was odd - at other points the video cut out but the other telemetry was coming through so if the video was running I'd expect everything else to too.
I mean the camera got absolutely beat to shit so I wasn’t shocked it cut out/reboot/whatever
I was thinking earlier when it lost the signal but those cameras were amazingly resilient - even when the lens got ruined by the fin smoke we got to see more when it cracked and could see the sparks through the holes.
Flight 4 ended with Starship igniting its three center Raptor engines and executing the first flip maneuver and landing burn since our suborbital campaign, followed by a soft splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean one hour and six minutes after launch.
I still can't believe that happened! Gives me so much confidence on their in-space propellant storage too, for some reason.
I just wish we had a video of it!
I know it’s a self-written report and therefore trying to put a positive spin on things (rightfully so - they did amazingly), but they didn’t even mention the exciting things that they want to do better next time, like better heat shields on the flaps.
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