Early Deorbit!? Massive Surprises from First Starship Flight 14 to Orbit Stunned Everyone...

Now some of you may remember from our earlier Starship test flights that we had an animation to help visualize what the deployment of our V3 sats would look like and today we have that exact vision in front of us. We've made it a reality. Three, two, one. Takeoff, pitching downrange. All right, a little more than 35 seconds into the flight. 33 out of 33 engines lit on super heavy. The window's shaking a bit here. 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 hot staging. 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 we're going to release will 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. First MECO powering down to all but five of those engines on the booster. Down to five. Six engines start up on the ship. Looks like we have 31 out of the 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. 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. We've had two of the 13 go out so far, 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 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. 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, a de-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 kilometers per hour. 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 altitude and coming back in. And 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 5, and then transition down to 3 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 pressure is nominal. Great call out there here. Raptor chamber pressure is nominal. Can see the plume on all six engines still lighting there. Man, Methylox burns beautiful purple. 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 5, and then finally down to 3. Landing burn startup. There's views from the booster. Down to 5. And we should be getting to ship engine cutoff in about the next 10 seconds. Or actually, now that we are engine out, we will run a little bit longer. All right, so there is Starship engine cutoff. Again, we're looking for just a single Raptor to light one of those sea levels. It's going to burn for just about 19 seconds. Burn two has started. Single Raptor still lit, doing the work to push us into orbit. Burn two shut down. No alerts or alarms on the board. That's always a great thing to hear. We should hopefully see the first ones starting to come out in the next few seconds. Our flight computer has moved over to payload deploy, seeing some motion. Looks like we're getting a little bit of more movement there, Dan. Should see it start making its way out the door. Also, just a beautiful shot of Earth below us there, just casually cruising around it. Each Starlink V3 satellite adds about 1 terabit per second of capacity to the constellation. So all 26 adds up to 26 total terabytes just on this one mission. Let's talk a little about the V3 Starlink satellite and the advancements it brings from the V2 mini Starlink, which we continue to launch in Falcon 9 from Dan Dinklage. Looks like they're coming out very smooth. There's another one coming out, and it's hard to get perspective here. Oh, here we go. We got another one. Oh, here we go. We got another one. Yeah, right about now we are on our way through the atmosphere heading to a splashdown, but fortunately we're in orbit today, so we're going to continue to get some of these views as we go through our payload deploy. Another one headed out the door, and unless I'm mistaken, it looks like we can actually see those lights you see off in the distance by the string of satellites that we have already deployed. Another one on the way out, so we're currently flying over roughly where we usually splashdown. We're usually another satellite out the door. We will hopefully see all of these sats start to start to raise their orbits in the next couple of days, get up into in the constellation. As Jake and Amanda were talking about, we're really excited for these Starlink V3 sats to get up there. Just sheer capacity is a game changer for them. Once we start getting into the the longer coast phase, we will start powering down a couple of things. All right, just about six minutes away from the end of payload deploy. Looks like we're 22 sats out the door right now. There goes 24. All right, that was number 25, and I think you could see the flashlight turned on that one. The ship looks a little bit brighter, and that should be 26. That should be the full load there, but let's double check. The light show has been underway for a couple of minutes now as Starship is actively re-entering the Earth's atmosphere from orbit and lining up for a landing burn and splashdown in the northern Pacific. Ever since we did our deorbit burn several minutes ago, which was done successfully, Starship essentially slowed down and started making its way through the atmosphere. We're watching the plasma build up as it is starting to rapidly slow down. At this point, the flaps have control over the vehicle, and we're going to continue to descend until we get to our landing burn and splashdown. So still a couple minutes to go. We are looking for a landing burn around three hours and eight minutes, so just about seven more minutes to go, but everything looking good with ship. The engines are chilling in, and things are looking good so far. Starship is continuing entry. External temperatures are coming down. Starship landing burn startup. Starship has landed. All right, and Starship has landed. As you saw, not not quite a soft, extra soft splashdown like we had on the last one, but Starship in the water nonetheless. Actually, we had just gotten word a few minutes ago that ship 40, which is on its way back to starbase, is in the northern hemisphere now. So we have two, one and a half, Starships in the water on planet Earth right now. So that was pretty spectacular. What a day. Just to recap, so