As the flight 10 data starts to pour in ...

As the data on yesterday's test flight starts to release, I don't see reporting of anything new that could be signs of bad outcomes along the way.  The flight test seemed to be entirely as planned.  

For the first time, SpaceX engineers received data on the performance of the ship's upgraded heat shield and control flaps during reentry back into the atmosphere. The three failed Starship test flights to start the year ended before the ship reached reentry. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has described developing a durable, reliable heat shield as the most pressing challenge for making Starship a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.

And there were lessons to learn from Tuesday's test flight. The ship made it all the way to the Indian Ocean intact, arriving next to a prepositioned buoy northwest of Australia, where it was just after sunrise Wednesday morning at the time of splashdown. A camera on the buoy showed the ship slowing down before contacting the water, then tipping over and exploding as expected.

Today, though, I got to see something I didn't see watching the mission.  The Starship changed color in flight, so that it looked rather orange right before landing in the Indian Ocean.  It's quite noticeable here; I'm rather confident that area was a dull silver like the stainless steel alloy that it is at launch 66 minutes earlier.  

Starship 36 settles down to reach zero velocity at the surface of the Indian Ocean. As expected, as soon as the engines were shut down, the ship tipped over and exploded. Image credit: SpaceX 

This article was published at 10:48 AM and by that time, no SpaceX officials talked about this and whether or not it was expected.  It could be an effect of the thermal environment the ship goes through during reentry, and remember that the flight had many experiments planned for the thermal protection systems. 

Those of us familiar with the Space Shuttle era remember seeing the Shuttles covered in white and black tiles.  The Thermal Protection System on the shuttles was not a slam dunk engineering success, where a set of tiles was installed on a shuttle and with the odd exception of hitting some piece of space junk leading to replacing a small number of tiles, it was close to zero maintenance.  In reality, tile damage was a regular occurrence throughout the 30 year shuttle program with tile repairs and replacements being done between every pair of missions of every shuttle.  

SpaceX is working on the same problems today.  Musk mentions thousands of tiles peeled off of the space shuttle Columbia when NASA first flew the orbiter on top of its modified 747 carrier aircraft in 1979.  For the desired "rapid reusability" targeted for Starship, that sort of repair and replacement after every flight isn't reasonable.  

"We are confident in making a fully reusable orbital heat shield but it will require many flights, many iterations to figure out where the weak points are in the heat shield, where we need to change the design, either strengthening the tile or changing how big the gap is between tiles, or changing what’s underneath the tile," Musk said in a discussion broadcast on SpaceX's official livestream of Monday's Starship launch countdown.
...
"The space shuttle heat shield would come back essentially partially broken and would require many months of refurbishment in order to fly again," Musk said. "What we’re trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be reflown immediately."

These are deep subjects, but not easily linked to the Flight Test 10 mission.  As always, there's no such thing as knowing too much.  SpaceX had a great day yesterday, one which it seems they were overdue  to have.  It's just that they have a lot of things they need to get working properly soon.  Starship won't make it to the moon without refueling in space, which means that has to be worked on soon, maybe even before they finish with the thermal protection systems.  The first refueling test missions were penciled in for this year but that isn't looking very likely as we're virtually in September already.  That requires more than one flightworthy Starship.