A Triumphant Return to Flight

Skeptics have enjoyed a string of Starship failures - but SpaceX has again proved them wrong.

Flight 10 of Starship has succeeded. A run a three flights that failed before completing their test objectives, and an explosion during testing, has been broken by a return to form by SpaceX.

This was Version 2 of the Starship, which began flying on Flight 7 and has before now never been tested through reentry. The ascent was mostly nominal apart from one engine shutting off at around 90 seconds, without having any noticable impact on the rest of the mission. This engine did not relight for the boostback burn either, but that was successful and the booster made a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico/America, while testing a contingency where one of the centre three engines did not light, and one of the middle ring of ten engines had to be started to make up the thrust.

The Ship made it to orbit, successfully opened its payload bay door, and deployed all of the Starlink mass simulators through its “Pez dispenser” mechanism, and closed the door.

It then demonstrated an on orbit restart of one of the Raptor engines, and proceeded to reentry. Early in reentry, something in the aft area of the Ship exploded.

We aren’t yet sure what this is, but the damage did not end the mission. Despite visible damage to the aft flaps, which were also stress tested intentionally during reentry by re-orientating the spacecraft, reentry and landing were completed successfully.

The staining on the heat shield has attracted speculation - some even thinking that a large part of the heat shield is gone and what we are seeing is damage to the underlying steel structure. I do not think this is the case - it seems to be something deposited on top of the heat shield from some of the test tiles close to the nose cone, that were attempt an active cooling method. I’ll come back to this at a later date once I have more solid information.

Where The Program Stands

Despite the accident at the ship test stand, and the need to modify the launch stand to perform a static fire on the next ship, the gap between this launch and the previous one was 91 days, only 6 days longer than the previous gap. We can see how this compares to previous gaps for Starship and for other vehicles of comparable payload: