OK - THAT was incredible

Starship Flight test 10 was simply incredible.  Going into the mission we knew they were testing far more than just getting Ship 37 to a suborbital flight and lots of things we might consider negative outcomes could simply mean a test of some idea was concluded.  Maybe the results were positive, maybe they were negative, we simply won't know but at the end of the flight, when Ship 37 landed on its tail in the Indian Ocean then exploded it was obvious that the mission was the big win that we were saying SpaceX needed.  

We watched the launch, watched the booster to see if it could land vertically in the Gulf, which it did before it exploded.  Thousands of degrees temperature difference between the engines, hardware and the Sea Water will do that.  That was followed almost immediately by the deployment of 8 mockups of Starlink satellites up at the Starship on its suborbital flight.  The last time we were close to watching that, the door to the "Pez dispenser" wouldn't open because some air in the ship's body generated enough pressure to keep the door closed.  So the simple fix was to drain the air out of the ship through another port before trying.  Looked excellent.

Once the Starlink satellites (size and weight mock-ups) were in Space, attention turned to the ship re-entering.  We got very good views of that whole process, part of which was to test different heat shield materials and ways of applying them.  I expected the hull to burn through in places, but I only saw some molten areas in corners of the flaps, like we did on last year's Ships.  

The ship never lost control and looked as stable as a building - going 25,000 km/hr.  We'll have to wait a bit for SpaceX's content to hit, but this video contains the full flight.  To help you reduce your time looking for the big events, the launch is around the middle of the slider bar (which gives times from the end of the video not from the start) and the end of the mission is around 66 minutes after the launch. The mission timer in the upper left corner is more valuable than the video slider bar at the bottom.

This is around the last fraction of a second of this booster's life. Screen capture from the NASA Spaceflight video. Image credit: SpaceX