Starship V3 is alive and kicking! The new, massively upgraded Starship and SuperHeavy rocket made its debut on Friday, and it was simply beautiful.
Starlink provided absolutely gorgeous high-quality video of the entire hour+ flight - far and away the best video of spaceflight I've ever seen. One of the mission objectives was to deploy 20 Starlink satellites (which it did), and one of the satellites switched on to capture a view of Starship after it deployed. It's really incredible video, and you can check it out here: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2057962516282577014
The mission did not hit 100% success - the booster engines shut off early after separation, and one of Ship's engines didn't light. But it flew just fine on 5 engines (redundancy FTW) and executed a perfect soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean (and then exploded when it tipped over, but that was TOTALLY PLANNED and the only way for the splashdown to end). MechaZilla chopstick catches will be attempted in the near future.
Over 1,000 upgrades were made to the ship and rocket since the last flight - which is great, but this meant 1,000+ opportunities for new failures. I was nervous, I admit. But it did fantastic.
Now, let's get our asses to the moon, then Mars.
