[lorenzohess]

The stress tests they'll perform are really interesting:

1) Starship will deploy "two modified satellites... [to] transmit imagery [of the heat shield] down to operators... Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test."

2) Relighting a Raptor engine

3) "For Starship entry, a single heat shield tile has been intentionally removed to measure the aerodynamic load differences on adjacent tiles when there is a tile missing"

4) Banking maneuver and rear flap structural test

[metalman]

missed the part where they are leveraging the starlink hardware for visuals durring tests. At some point someone from space x quiped that they were in the business of gathering data on rockets, and given that they have the ability to insert a sattelite into any orbit at there discretion, it would be a trivial extra cost to get full spectrum video of there test flights from orbit.