The Starship’s Flight 12 saga continues. Yesterday, Elon Musk’s space-launch and astronautics company, SpaceX, shared additional footage of Starship 39’s water landing.
This short, 23-second video was captured by a special camera mounted on a buoy in the Indian Ocean, just close to the landing location of the upper stage Ship 39.
It took a few days for SpaceX to finally share this stunning footage captured with a buoycam. During the launch day Flight 12 coverage, only a few glimpses of Starship’s landing were aired live, before the spacecraft disappeared behind the clouds of mist (created due to a large object’s splashdown and extreme heat created by the Raptor 3 engines’ thrust).
SpaceX successfully ignited two sea-level Raptor 3 engines on Flight 12 Starship during the landing burn. These two engines provided enough thrust to help the Starship hover over the surface of the ocean.
The downward thrust works as brakes, so that the Starship does not hit the ocean at full velocity. The few seconds of hover over the sea surface result in a soft splashdown landing (minimizing damage to the ship and marine life).
A single Starship Raptor 3 engine provides a thrust of 280 tonne-feet (tf). As we can see in the image above and video below, two Raptor 3 engines provide around 580 tf of downward thrust.
This force can hold a mega structure as large as the upper stage Starship (~53 meters tall and 29.5 meters wide) in mid-air as it descends from the sky.
Interestingly, SpaceX uses the aft flaps of Starship to glide the spacecraft in the air. During the Flight 12 test, the aft flaps actuated as intended, so this experiment was also a success in this mission.
If you look at the footage of the landing from the buoycam below, it looks like the Starship has suddenly appeared from out of the sky. I call it the Space Phantom.
In our previous report, we covered the epic moments of Flight 12 Starship’s liftoff and landing in the Indian Ocean. However, SpaceX shared the following new footage, and it opened new doors for awe and inspiration.
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