Ah yes, that would increase the separation quite quickly.

I guess they do the relight test after the simulator deploy because it is a higher risk activity - the pez dispenser is very unlikely to cause a RUD.

Apart from the spectator value of mounting a camera on one of the Starlink simulators, how much value would such a camera have to SpaceX in being able to monitor the re-entry? How long before the simulator was too far away / too hot to be able to continue transmitting useful images?

How will the transition from 5 to 3 engines on the Booster landing burn add additional redundancy? How is that different from going straight to 3 engines?

Previously the 3 engine landing burn was for about 16 seconds. If there was a 5 second burn with 5 engines then that would be followed by a 7 or 8 second burn with 3 engines, giving a total elapsed burn time of 13 seconds.

Is there a gap between the 5 engine burn and the 3 engine burn or will they just switch off two engines after 5 seconds. Does that mean that they can then choose which two to turn off and avoid the need to allow for the 0.2 seconds engine startup time that would be needed if there was a failure of one of the 3 engines. Is that the only benefit of a 5-3 landing burn?

Is there a visualization anywhere of the maneuver that is intended to mimic the approach path to the launch site? Will it come in over Mexico and then do some kind of wiggle? What population centers do they need to avoid?

Official SpaceX livestream on X: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWYzDXjWGQ

Spaceflight Now and Space Devs links added. I’ve also fixed the dateful link. I think it might have been the & that was also messed up and may be resolved differently by different browser - anyway I hope it is fixed now.

Thanks. The date link was a bit wrong but seems to give the correct result: https://dateful.com/convert/utc?t=2011&d=2024-02-23T04:11

I didn’t notice the t=2011 argument and just appended T04:11 to the d argument. Seems to work ok for me.

OCISLY towed by Debra C is making 5.5 knots and currently about 60km (30 nautical miles) off the Mexican coast: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?mmsi=368351350 (MARMAC 304 is the original registered name of OCISLY)

Support ship Go Beyond is about 4 hours out of Long Beach on its way to “LZ :)” https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9622655

Broadcast has started now.

SpaceX live streaming starts at 12:24 UTC here: https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1dRKZEWQvrXxB

The flight profile here https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-2 does not say there will be a flip. But concludes with “Excitement Guaranteed”. So anything could happen.

07:00 CT = 13:00 UTC

If it gets that far then I’d imagine that it would attempt to flip. Although I do think I recall something said about not doing a flip to ensure that there’s nothing that needs to be recovered. This would mean they don’t need recovery ships in the area.

At stage separation how horizontal is Starship? If there was no vertical moment then how significant would the gravity loss actually be?

AFAIK most of the gravity loss is in the first few second of a launch but I don’t have any idea what you are losing by the time you get to stage separation.