Scientia Plus: Starship lost

7:48 PM CDT



Here's another video by Scott Manley, who breaks it down a bit further. Not too much to add, except for the attitude of the Starship was not maintained. Something may have failed as it was coming down through the atmosphere. Even if the tiles held up well, it wasn't going to stay together coming down like that.











end update, the original post follows:

Debris comes off the Starship at the part of the video where it is started in the replay. I saw that in real time, and it was no surprise when the ship broke up. Upon replay, it isn't entirely conclusive that it is the heat tiles, but what else could it have been? The ship may have broken up when it hit the dense part of the atmosphere as it came in for the splashdown.





As for the booster, it seemed to be coming down pretty hot. The engines lit up, but it didn't seem to be enough of them, or they were lit up too late, and the vehicle appears to have hit the water at high speed. Maybe close to supersonic speed. There was a picture right up to the end. If there was anything else significant, I couldn't tell at this point. Note: it was about 6 and 7 minutes into the video, so by the time the above was cuing up, the booster had already crashed.