This cool new perspective was leaked on Twitter by BocaBrain. OP claims it was flight 6, but the consensus of the community seems to be that it was flight 4. It’s super impressive that Starship can sustain this kind of damage and still land, but it also highlights how much work is left to do. For the new grads – “heat shields… there’s a great future in heat shields.”
https://x.com/bocasbrain/status/1879734226704273747?s=46&t=rSWLRnUYmBr9MnyUiu7Mkg
7 Comments
[deleted]
You can see the hot spots where the flaps are. Looks pretty toasty.
I’ve also seen people saying this is probably ship 29 (flight 4). That’s certainly the one that got the toastiest where the one flap almost melted off and the camera lens cracked.
I’m not going to speculate though.
Wow, you can quite clearly see where the flap hinges are!
Yeah no grilled banana ,can’t be the last one
That’s cool. Or hot. Still have a long long way to go before that thing doesn’t get a single hot spot.
That’s real neat, I’m trying to hit the character limit to post. Does anyone have a link to video?
Well let’s hope it is fixed. I wouldn’t be so sure, since the rear flaps also had burn through and they don’t seem to be very different to V1. I’m feeling less and less confident in SpaceX achieving their proposed payload to LEO, because every version of starship gets heavier. Let’s see what their active cooling is able to mitigate.