SpaceX's Starship blasts off from Texas

Three, two, one. Pitching down range. Booster Raptor chamber pressure's nominal. Thirty seconds into flight. 33 out of 33 Raptor engines lit on the Super Heavy booster arcing away from us here at Starbase. Coming up on Max Q, maximum aerodynamic pressure, which again for this flight is going to be higher than it has been on any of our previous Starship flights. So we're passing through that maximum aerodynamic pressure over a minute now into flight. Still seeing 33 out of 33 Raptor engines lit and burning. Our next major moment's going to be coming up in just a little over a minute from now, when we're going to get to hot staging. We're going to shut down all but five of those engines on the booster. It's our version of MECO. Most engines cut off. And then we're going to ignite the six engines on the ship while it is still attached to do that separation. As a reminder, we try to do a directional flip. So when you watch on your screen, we're hopefully going to be sending that booster towards the bottom of the frame. For the booster itself, it's like doing a flip up. It'll go towards the bottom of your frame. We do that by lighting the engines in a slightly staggered sequence. Standing by for hot staging. All but five engines down. Six ignite. And the booster now doing its boost-back burn. It looks like we lit all 33 initially. Now we're down to 13. We're seeing six out of six Raptors lit on the ship. Boost-back burn shut down. And boost-back burn shut down. So it looks like we were able to get through the boost-back burn this time around. It was one of the key objectives we didn't have on the last flight. And we've got six engines lit on the ship. All right. So that's the first of two burns that the booster is going to be doing to kind of send it back towards us. It's going to be landing a couple of miles offshore from Starbase, hopefully. We're going to try and get it all the way down to do a landing burn where we're going to use those 13 center engines. They're going to ignite. That's what's going to really bleed off all that velocity that it's built up. And it will eventually hopefully transition to five engines to kind of fine-tune its path in. And then all the way down to three for the remaining bit. All right. We've got a couple of minutes to go until we get there. So booster is going to coast for a little bit. Ship still seeing six out of six Raptor engines lit. Four minutes into the flight. Ship's got about four minutes left. Getting some killer views. Kate, Nate, how was the view from down there? It was incredible. I mean, it just shot off the pad. And seeing all the crowd now running back inside to take views on the screen here, it was amazing. Yeah. One of these days I'm going to learn to not stare at the engines because now I have a bright blob in my vision. Now, speaking of vision, we could see both stages there on your screen. Starship's second stage is still firing its engines. You can follow along with that with the GUI down on the bottom right-hand side of your screen. Still following the planned flight path as well. Beautiful views of planet Earth there behind the ship. That's right. And we're actually getting a live shot off the booster right now. Oh, that's so cool. An onboard camera. You can see the plume from Starbase where it just lifted off five minutes ago. Starship on nominal trajectory. We are there. That is us. I kind of want to run back outside and wave. Right. Now, again, this booster is not planning to come back to the tower or the launch site for this particular launch. We are going to be planning to do an ocean splashdown just off the coast of Starbase. So hoping to still get some amazing views of that. Pretty awesome to see the Raptor engines there on the left-hand side of your screen. We can actually see the plume there of those center Raptors. Those are the sea level ones, as well as the vacuum Raptors are the three on the larger ones on the outer radius. Now, just like on tower catches, we are going to be doing a 13 engine landing burn to slow the booster down. Hopefully we can get a live camera of the booster right now as we're going into that phase. Awesome shot. You can see it there. So right now the booster is using their three hypersonic grid fins to guide itself through the atmosphere toward its landing site. You can see we're only five kilometers above the sea right here. Just heard the call out for a landing burn startup for the booster. I have a feeling the crowd is about to go wild here. And another awesome landing for Super Heavy. Congratulations to all the teams here at Starbase and at our SpaceX team. An amazing, amazing deal. Everything continues to go well with ship, as you can see there on your screen. Yeah, we've got about a minute left with the ship engines on just looking at the booster real quick. It didn't look like we lit all 13 engines that we were planning for that initial landing burn. We were targeting a softer splashdown. And as you saw, it came in with quite a bit of velocity still. So landing velocity did look a little bit high, but really cool to make it all the way back this time to that landing burn. We'll dig in, figure out how to turn on all those engines and then get to a full landing soon. But all eyes on ship. We are just a little ways away from getting those engines turned off. We expect it to burn about eight minutes and change. And so hopefully just about 15 minutes to go. Sounds like we just got the sonic boom here at Starbase from the booster splashdown. And engine shutdown. All right, Starship 6 Raptor engines have successfully shut down. Nominal orbit insertion. And there's our callout for nominal orbit insertion. So we got a ship in space. We've got a booster in the Gulf where we were planning to send it. It's a hell of a start to the day, Kate. Yeah, it sure is. All of our colleagues here are filing in through the doors. A lot of people wanted to stay outside and hear the boom. And so it's pretty great to see a ship in space. And everybody's super excited out here. That's right. And as guaranteed, it has been an awesome day so far. All this action in just nine minutes now and objectives are done for the booster. Just want to quickly flag that that booster did land in a clear zone. We clear those before launch well ahead so that we ensure everyone is safe before the launch and after. So we're getting ready now for our in space objectives. Yeah, we've got a few minutes until the next milestone. So sit tight and enjoy the space views and of course, the space jams. We'll be back here at T plus 14 minutes to deploy our payload, which is 20 of our newest Starlink version 3 satellites. So we'll see you soon. Ship FTS is safe. Welcome back. If you're just joining us, we're getting ready to deploy 20 Starlink version 3 satellites. That will get underway after we open the payload door in just about a minute. Now, for those of you that perhaps missed the previous 14 minutes, this is the second flight of Starship version 3. This is flight 13. It lifted off. It had a beautiful ascent as well as a ship ignition and stage separation. It was literally picture perfect from here at Starbase. Picture perfect. And then we continued with that booster hot stage separation. Amazing to see some live replays of that. And of course, the booster performing its own boost back and landing. Yeah. Ship continued for about eight minutes with all six of its engines and made its second engine cutoff where we heard good orbital insertion and we've been coasting in space for the last few minutes. Now we're getting ready to deploy our very first real Starlink version 3 satellites. The door will be opening here in just about six seconds from now. Now, we won't have the same views as we did on flight 12 of our payload. We don't have those cameras on board these Starship version 3s. That was a Dodger Dog exclusive. But we will be able to see them deploy from the ship. As Kate said, we should see the door open up really soon. We haven't quite gotten it open already. We've got 20 of these Starlink V3 satellites. Looks like the PES door is open. And so, yeah, this is the first time we've got Starlink V3 satellites getting ready to go into space. And, I mean, these things are really just kind of crazy upgrades that they're going to bring to the network where you start talking about just symmetric gigabit speeds through the Starlink network pretty much anywhere on the planet that this is going to unlock. So really exciting. These satellites are only going to be in space for about 20 minutes. Sorry about that. These will only be in space for about 20 minutes because they're on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship itself. This is essentially just giving us a chance to try and run as many tests as possible, deploy the solar arrays, antennas, whatever we can on these vehicles. We are intentionally being a little scrappy with it. They might be playing some bumper cars once they're out of the door, but we are looking to get these deployed over the next couple of minutes.