Starship is going in at an "aggressive angle"

A still from SpaceX's livestream shows the Starship spacecraft heading back down to Earth on Tuesday. 

SpaceX

The Starship spacecraft is gearing up for a landing in the Indian Ocean. It’s done this a couple times before on prior test flights, leaving each vehicle to sink to a watery grave as SpaceX hashes out the maneuvers it will use to eventually recover them.

Starship landed in a spot-on position during the last test flight in October. But SpaceX won’t necessarily try to repeat success as it seeks to gather new data on this test flight.

“We’re going to fly the ship at an aggressive angle of attack once it’s moving slower than the speed of sound,” SpaceX engineer Jesse Anderson said on the livestream earlier. “This means we’ll be flying nose down instead of our usual belly flop orientation during final descent. This will — no doubt — stress the limits of the flaps’ ability to maintain control, but it will be a chance to get real flight data on what our limits actually are.”

The “flaps” Anderson mentioned are small wings attached to the side of the Starship vehicle. They’re meant to brace the winds of reentry and help slow the vehicle down. During a test flight over the summer, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said they had been reduced to “skeleton hands” as the jarring physics of reentry tore them apart.

Starship is also designed to make a “belly flop” maneuver as it undergoes reentry. The motion orients Starship parallel to Earth’s surface to slow the vehicle down — like a skydiver approaching Earth. SpaceX will try a steeper path this time. It’s all designed to test the limits.