Ship 41 rolls to Pad 2 carrying two flown tiles from Ship 40

5 min read · reported by NASASpaceflight

SpaceX rolled Ship 41 to the launch site for stacking with Booster 21, and the heat shield on that ship includes a first for the Starship program: two tiles recovered from Ship 40 after Flight 13.

Those tiles sit on the aft end of Ship 41, near the aft flaps. They came off a vehicle that spent 24 days in the Indian Ocean after splashdown and later returned to Starbase on the heavy-lift vessel Forte.

A Starship heat shield uses about 20,000 tiles, so reusing two of them is only a small sample. Even so, it is the first time flown Starship tile hardware has been assigned to fly again.

Booster 21 was already waiting on Pad 2, and stacking Ship 41 onto it will complete the Flight 14 vehicle. SpaceX is targeting the mission no earlier than September 28, pending regulatory approval.

If the flight proceeds as planned, it will be Starship’s first attempt at orbit, with a multi-hour coast and a planned deployment of operational Starlink V3 satellites before a Pacific splashdown.

The next major program goal named in SpaceX’s latest documentary episode is returning a ship to the launch site, a landing that would place more demand on the heat shield than an ocean splashdown.

The two tiles now heading to the pad are the visible link between that next stack and Flight 13.

Ship 41 has two tiles taken from Starboat Ship 40. A very useful refly of the TPS. https://t.co/HO0xFQoV79 pic.twitter.com/whyAHVcr3x

— NSF – NASASpaceflight.com (@NASASpaceflight) September 23, 2026

SpaceX released the third episode in its Starship documentary series on September 16 and posted the same 28-minute film to YouTube on September 18.

“The Holy Grail of Rocketry” centers on Ship 40, the Flight 13 upper stage that survived splashdown in the Indian Ocean, remained intact for weeks, and later yielded heatshield hardware for Ship 41.

Flight 13 launched from Starbase on July 24. Ship 40 completed the softest splashdown of the Starship test campaign, then tipped onto its side and stayed intact. Recovery of the ship was not the mission’s primary objective.

SpaceX had studied an Indian Ocean recovery before and removed that goal from the previous two V3 flights after earlier ships broke up on water impact.

Control room audio in the film records the landing call and the first reaction to an intact vehicle. “We got a whole rocket. We got the whole thing.” Another caller says the ship appears likely to last long enough for a recovery attempt, and SpaceX then moved to recover S40. Mauro Prina, SpaceX senior director of Starship engineering, said he did not expect the rocket to survive tipover. The intact vehicle, he said, left SpaceX “sitting on a mine of gold of data” in the Indian Ocean and would allow design changes at least three months earlier than he had expected.

One speaker in the film calls the floating vehicle “the absolute gold of the data” and says the team does not know how long it will remain intact. After descoping recovery on recent V3 flights, SpaceX put the effort back on the schedule once S40 survived.

Recovery crews reached S40 about 500 to 600 nautical miles off Western Australia and made the first hookup to a Starship in the water. Crew members said the vehicle had little draft, about a foot and a half to two feet, and a large sail area that made it hard to control. “It fought us the entire way,” one crew member said. “The rocket didn’t want to get recovered.”

Sixteen- to 18-foot seas and 40- to 45-knot winds slowed the tow. Justin Styer, senior director of Starship launch, said the recovery was off plan after a couple of weeks.

The tow was extremely slow, and even that speed began to damage the vehicle. SpaceX first planned a tow toward mainland Australia, then abandoned that route. On August 7, Elon Musk said the recovery was “not looking good,” while noting that crews had obtained close-up photos of critical heat-shield and engine areas for later upgrades.

Crews later secured the ship off Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, about 24 days after splashdown. SpaceX then used Forte to carry S40 back to Starbase. In the film, crews float the ship onto Forte’s deck, set it on a cradle, and deballast the vessel so S40 can be tied down.

An engineer on the barge said the flight was just over a month old and the rocket had been dry on deck for two days. “I think in terms of the data we’ve been able to get back, this mission has been an absolute success.”

After teams confirmed S40 was stable and safe to approach, SpaceX removed two thermal protection tiles for reuse on Ship 41. An engineer in the film said a single tile represents almost half a decade of development and that installing 20,000 tiles creates 20,000 chances to get the attachment wrong. Flight 13 footage shows Ship 40 in peak heating. A caller says the vehicle is entering at about 25 times the speed of sound and that the energy becomes heat. The ship then flies the “swoosh” maneuver used to practice a return toward a tower before the landing burn and splashdown.

Prina and other engineers in the episode said tiles also face loads on ascent. Airflow during launch can get under tiles and pull them off, and plasma can do the same during reentry. A missing tile leaves that area protected by ablative material, which is not fully reusable. The film compares that failure mode to tile loss on the Space Shuttle during ascent. Recent flights identified the areas most likely to lose tiles. SpaceX is using curved tiles to change airflow and plasma paths, reduce heating in tile gaps, and limit tiles coming loose, and it is also using different retention hardware in those areas. Engineers in the film said discoveries from S40 are being applied to the heat shield on S41.

Flight 13 also damaged Super Heavy. During the final phase of Booster 20’s boostback toward the Gulf of Mexico, the three center Raptor engines showed signs of ice clogging.

B20 ended the burn early and ignited eight of 13 engines on the landing attempt, but the booster did not slow enough for a soft splashdown. Later boosters received ice-filter mounts and software changes aimed at relight reliability.

SpaceX said in the film that S40 would have been caught if a tower had been at the landing site on Flight 13. The two tiles removed from S40 are the ones now riding Ship 41 to the pad.

The episode also recaps earlier SpaceX reuse work, including Grasshopper hop tests and the first Falcon 9 pad landing at Cape Canaveral. S40 did not complete a tower landing, but it left SpaceX with a recovered heat shield, inspection photos, and hardware assigned to the next ship.

Featured Image: Credit: Jerry Pike for NSF.

Reported by NASASpaceflight. Reproduced unedited by Everything Space. View the original →