Good bet every bit of that was some part of a rehearsal.
I defer to @Dr.Strangelove’s more comprehensive knowledge.
But they don’t waste good opportunities willy nilly. They are a very thoughtful development org. Note that "thoughtful " <> “conservative”. IOW, “smart” <> “slow”.
They’re almost certainly simulating a tower catch already. Whether they’re close enough yet to justify an attempt, I don’t know–though they did say they were only “meters” off on the last landing, which actually sounds a bit on the high side, though it very much depends on the degree (and of course it’s still very impressive for landing on the other side of the planet). 1.1 meters off is probably fine. 5 is not.
Plenty of time to fine-tune things, at any rate. They have most of the big pieces nailed. But they need to switch to v3 and dial things in on that.
DGPS with a couple transmitters permanently installed near the tower is different from one transmitter on a semi-anchored buoy flopping around in even a calm-ish ocean.
I don’t doubt they can hit any target that can be precisely defined in real time.
Very good point. They may also have a non-GPS guidance system on the tower, though I suppose DGPS is probably good enough that they may as well use that.
An excellent article with details about Flight 10:
Much of this confirms what was speculated. The orange residue was from a few metallic test tiles that ablated in the oxygen-rich reentry conditions. Unfortunately, it looks like metallic tiles aren’t going to be workable.
And the white residue is from a different kind of material ablating away, where hot gases got between and beneath the tiles near the top. Which means they need to seal the tile gaps better.
There was a previously unknown experiment using what they call “crunch wrap”. Instead of sealing the tiles using a kind of caulk-like material, they wrap each tile with some kind of material, put it in place, then cut off the protruding material. Apparently this worked very well and they’re going to use it everywhere on Flight 11 (which will otherwise be a move conservative flight than previous ones).
To me this sounds like their #1 priority is to make tile production and replacement easy. Instead of a fiddly liquid sealant, the crunch wrap can be added when the tile is manufactured, and then installed by robot without any extra steps. So they may be at the point where they see a certain amount of heat shield damage as inevitable, but if they can refurbish it cheaply enough, it’s not a big deal. They’re shooting for airline-like operations, but of course airplanes still require ongoing maintenance of items like brake pads.
Another interesting point is that they found the ship stability in the transonic regime exceeded what their models (or even wind tunnel tests) said. I think this is a key advantage of a test-heavy development program. Normally one would take the results of the model and then be conservative by some factor to account for it being wrong. But what if the model is wrong in the other direction, and that you have much more margin than you expected? You can’t find out until you test. And if the model conflicts with experiment, then it’s the model that’s wrong.
Another launch scheduled for around 3 hours from now.
You mean I have to split my attention watching baseball and Starship? how rude.
Seriously, thanks for the heads up.
Dang. I just got up for a quick Midnight Munchy snack. Now I’m stuck at the computer. Why can’t they launch at a more UK-friendly hour? 
And they’ll probably scrub anyway… 
They time it so takeoff and splashdown can both be in daylight. I suppose they might do early morning to late afternoon.
A flawless test flight! I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Now to do it routinely enough so they can try a true orbital flight with return to base. ETA: does a due-east launch allow for Starship to catch up with Boca Chica after the Earth’s rotation has carried the launch site eastward?
I finally had time between last night and this morning to watch the whole thing on Spaceflight Now: Watch live: SpaceX launches Starship Flight 11, finale of Block 2 upper stage.
Excellent commentating; they’re perfectly happy to have silence on the audio channel when there’s nothing to say. And no gushing.
There was some amount of ablation going on during reentry, and once they got low in the atmosphere you could see a bunch of little loose tabs of black fabric flapping in the breeze. None of which looked big enough to endanger the mission unless small loose stuff really cascaded into big missing stuff much earlier in the flight, but all of which represent obstacles to rapid re-use. Modulo how much loose and damaged stuff they’re willing to launch with again.
Gotta’ tell you that I was nervous the whole time; every camera wobble I wondered if Starship was starting a spin-out. And given that the default is that everything in space will go wrong, I was pleasantly surprised that the dummy Starlink deployment went off without a hitch. If the doors had jammed open that would have been a mission kill for reentry.
Not nearly ready for rapid turnaround yet. Look at the photo in this article. No way something looking like that would be stuck back on top of a booster.
Wow. Thank you.
That was worse than I expected. They proved they can survive starting from a suborbital velocity. Lotta work yet to be even refurbishable.
To an extent they’re testing how durable Starship with deliberate omissions of tiles. I don’t know if any of the visible damage is due to those tests or that was unexpected. Still, that Starship could soft-land after that is encouraging. The decision to build the rocket out of stainless steel is looking very wise; I doubt carbon fiber would have survived heavy oxidation stress.
Has SpaceX committed to a cadence of test launches for Starship yet, or is it still in the feeling their way forward stage?
apologies if this was already asked but why not land on a ship?
For reasons unknown to me the decision was made to have the “chopstick” catches for the eventual operational launches; so Starship and Heavy don’t have landing gear. Almost all launches are expected to be based on minimum turnaround time back at launch point. Since the lunar (and maybe someday Mars) variants will need them I presume its a possibility, but evidently they decided not to do it during the testing phase. A downrange barge landing for Heavy might offer some additional payload for special missions, but that would have to balanced against the weight and complexity of landing gear.
A big complicated weight that stays on Earth is easier than a smaller and simpler weight that needs to stay with the ship.
They could still build a barge with a tube center sunk into it to capture it. It would make it easier to study the lift vehicle.
Ran across this interesting video on what the accomodations on a Starship to Mars might look like.
