They did leave two tiles off the aft end and put in a thinner tile. Possible that those spots burned through and damaged the sensors, but the sea-level engines were healthy enough to still work.
They did leave two tiles off the aft end and put in a thinner tile. Possible that those spots burned through and damaged the sensors, but the sea-level engines were healthy enough to still work.
Testing Raptor relighting on the float would be my guess. If the deceleration burn fails, the ballistic trajectory would still bring it down in the IFT-1 and IFT-2 target area.
It’s more an issue of how you’ll get the second stage to survive re-entry at orbital velocity. Which the current F9 upper stage can’t pull off, seeing how it doesn’t have heat shields. Bolting heat shields on it probably isn’t happening, the added mass would cut into payload capacity too much.
They’re probably still poring over the data. Telemetry from the temperature sensors, the feeds from the internal cameras, data from the booster and why two of its engines failed and so on. Most likely also data on what and how many TPS tiles S29 lost on the way down, I doubt the video feeds were their only way of checking those All in all, it’s gotta be terabytes of data to sort through and analyze