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Very nice and easy splash down. Impressive.

Leaving the pad. Remotely operated camera photo by Scott Shilke of Space News Florida



In the ocean after landing



The hairlike streaks come from the gap filler between the tiles. The tiles themselves appear to be in good shape.

No late Saturday update in general media about whether SS-13 is still floating on the ocean. If China were to hustle really fast, maybe they could get down there and appropriate the spaceship and its secrets.

No apparent speculation about why the booster engines all fired during takeoff but not enough lit during descent to prevent a hard slam into the Gulf. (Though obviously too early yet for proper diagnosis.)

(Jul 25, 2026 06:55 PM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]No late Saturday update in general media about whether SS-13 is still floating on the ocean. If China were to hustle really fast, maybe they could get down there and appropriate the spaceship and its secrets.

There's talk that Chinese "fishing boats"/spy ships are in the area, probably assigned to capture telemetry and get video of the landing. I don't expect them to make a move towards S40 though, since there's a SpaceX recovery ship on scene.

The rather odd looking ship in the photo below is Go Australis, an Australia-based offshore natural-gas field support ship that SpaceX contracted to serve as their recovery ship. Last I heard S40 is still floating and the options seem to be either to sink it or tow it. I'm sure that the SpaceX engineers really want to get a closeup look at the heat shield, so they are probably lobbying forcefully for recovery. But while Go Australis is powerful enough to be able to perform the tow, it might not be outfitted to do it. So towing it back to Australia may not be practical.

I do hope that they try though.

Quote:No apparent speculation about why the booster engines all fired during takeoff but not enough lit during descent to prevent a hard slam into the Gulf. (Though obviously too early yet for proper diagnosis.)

Yeah, no word on that yet.

Elon says:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2080876967839031712

"Unless we discover problems after mission data review, SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on next flight"

Since the ship will have to travel all the way around the world, perhaps several times, before it lines up on Starbase again, this is verification that Flight 14 will indeed be full-orbital.

The Starship suborbital era is ending!

Here's the video, recorded from the ground by a South African, of Ship 40 performing its in space engine relight test

https://x.com/craignattrass/status/2080798332260131195

And here's what looks like a scene from a science fiction movie, but is actually a screenshot of video shot from the booster, showing S 40 powering away with all six engines lit, right after stage separation.

Yes! I miss the tower catches and freestanding landings.

Does that mean they're towing it?

(Yesterday 02:36 AM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]Does that mean they're towing it?

No. It's where they would have to tow it from. Consensus seems to be growing that they will just sink it, though the fact that they haven't done that already suggests that they are still studying it: getting sample tiles from different locations, carefully photographing it, etc.

The recovery team in the ocean aren't the heat shield engineers, but they are probably in communication by Starlink and getting requests from the engineers about what data to gather.

Ah, thanks.