Something Weird Happened During SpaceX Starship Flight 14 First EVER Orbital Attempt! transcript

activates at tminus 17 seconds. So if we trigger a hold after that, it will unfortunately result in a scrub for the day. >> All right, so we are just about to cross 2 minutes. We have fully closed out on propellant load on both ship and boosters. So we are ready to go. We are coming up again. We've got that hold point at tminus one minute if we need to hold. not currently tracking any holds on the board. So hopefully we can blow right by it.

Don't be surprised if we recycle. That has happened in the past. Um and we can hold out as it's been mentioned. We can hang out for several minutes at T-minus 60 seconds if we need to. All right, everything continuing to look healthy on both vehicles. We are not tracking any holds coming up on tminus one minute. Most ambitious Starship launch to date. Hopefully sending this thing into orbit. All right, coming up on that T-minus 60.

Let's see if we go right through it and then we'll head down to the pad and listen in on Starship. Just go for launch. It was 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 pitching down range. All right, little more than 35 seconds into the flight. 33 out of 33 engines lit on Super Heavy. The windows shaking a bit here as >> booster and chip avionics power and telemetry nominal. >> Coming up on max Q maximum aerodynamic pressure on the rocket. All right, so we're through maximum aerodynamic pressure.

Stress is going to come down now as we start flying through the upper parts of Earth's atmosphere. Still seeing 33 out of 33 lit on the booster. Might have one of those center. 13 just went out. Still flying on 32 out of 33. Next major event coming up is going to be hotstaging. That's when we are going to look to light all six engines on the ship while it's still attached to the booster. That's going to push it away.

That's going to come in about 40 seconds from now. So once we get there, the clamps holding the two vehicles together at that interstage are going to release. We'll light the six engines on ship. We've got a very specific startup sequence. So we're hopefully going to kick the booster in the right direction that helps us maximize performance, use the least amount of propellant, and might just give us a cool view of the ship flying away.

We'll see. All right, coming up on hot staging cut off >> first. Mo powering down to all but five of those engines on the booster. >> Down to five. Six engines start up on the ship right >> way back start up. Looks like we have 31 out of 33 on the boost back for the initial phase. Down to three on the booster. So its boost back burn will be finishing shortly. and shut down. All right, so boost back burn complete. >> Seeing six engines on the ship nominal. >> All right, so that was the first of two burns to send it back to Earth.

The next one is going to be the landing burn where we're going to look to light up to 13 of the center engines. We'll see if we'll be able to relight. Uh we've had two of the 13 go out so far. Uh so we'll see if we'll be able to relight all of those as long as we get 11. We'll be able to bleed off enough velocity for kind of a nominal landing burn, but we'll see if we're able to make it there. Good news though, still seeing six out of six Raptors lit on the ship as it continues the initial climb into space.

Again, this first burn just putting it on a suborbital trajectory, but things are looking good. Amanda and Jake, you guys with me down there? >> Yeah, we're down here. We are, man. Still shaking a little bit from that that >> a little bit for sure. >> That had uh that had the whole lawn, the whole building, everything was going absolutely nuts down here. >> Yeah. And as you can see, Starship's upper stage still firing its engines.

Um, and again, as a reminder, the ship objectives for a nominal mission today include that orbit insertion burn, payload deploy of those 26 operational Starlink satellites, followed by a long coast with six orbits of the Earth, AD orbit, and then followed by re-entry, descent, and landing. >> Yeah, we could see ship there still accelerating with six out of six engines under power. That is great to see. Just crossed over 10,000 kilometers per hour.

Just take a second to realize that we're already at 10,000 nominal trajectory. >> And we just heard that call out. That ship is on nominal trajectory. So that's great news. Things are going pretty well so far. >> Yep. And on the left side of the screen there, you can see booster its altitude is starting to come down. So we've hit our max max altitude and coming back in. And uh although we're not doing a tower catch today, we are going to simulate the same way that we would.

So we'll do a 13 engine landing burn to slow down. We'll then transition to five and then transition down to three for the final hover. Ship still with all six engines lit. Getting great footage here. Thank you, Starlink. Can see Earth below us. >> Raptor chamber pressures nominal. >> Great call out there hearing. Raptor chamber pressures nominal. Can see the plume on all six engines still lighting there. Man, methylox burns beautiful purple.

That looks that looks great. So, we are just about 10 seconds away from landing burn start. So, that's where we'll first ignite the center 13 engines, bring that down to five, and then finally down to three. >> Landing burn startup. >> There's views from the booster. Down to five and confirmed landing. >> That looked like a pretty soft splash down. >> Don't know if you guys can all hear everyone going crazy behind us.

All right, nice job by the booster there. Looking like we made a soft splash down right off the coast of Starbase. And ship is still going strong here. Dan, how's it looking upstairs? >> Hey, Jake. Uh, so you can see by our little telemetry in the bottom right, we just had engine 6, one of the Arvac, shut down early. We're planning on that one going for probably another 30 seconds. So, uh, similar to flight 12 kind of scenario here where we had an arvac out on the first flight of V3.

So, we do have engine out capability. So, the ship adjusts for this. So, we're still running on five out of the six and we should be getting to ship engine cut off in about the next 10 seconds. Or actually now that we our engine out we will run a little bit longer. All right. So there is starship engine cut off. All right. So, we are in space. Now comes the next step. So, uh we will listen in for a couple of minutes.

Uh so, that initial burn, we did have an engine go out on the way up pills. So, the team obviously going to take a quick look at that. Uh we've said it repeatedly, we're only going to commit to orbit if everything's looking really healthy and an engine out on assent even though you're not going to use it for the rest of time on orbit uh could drive us to not commit. So uh we are going to stand by for just a moment here and listen in.

I'm going to toss it down to Amanda and Jake reaction so far. It was great seeing the booster get to the water. Uh and we'll be back in a moment with some ship updates. Yeah, thanks Dan. Definitely exciting flight for booster so far. Lots of things have happened and like you said, we'll be looking forward to hearing the news on on path forward for ship today. >> Yep. And just to give a quick recap in case you're joining us, a lot has already happened here in just uh under 10 minutes.

So we saw booster lift.