I think that's the ascent burn. It doesn't look like the engines re-lit at all for the descent. (I imagine they aren't supposed to light until they're a lot closer to the ground than they were when the video was lost.)
At altitude 22km superheavy was moving at 4310 kmh (34:18 in linked video) speed then dropped continually, at 34:45 in the video the icons show that 3 engines were lit, altitude was 1km and speed was 1300 kmh. At 34:49 you can see flames, speed continues to drop, then you see the sea rushing up, then it cuts
T+43: seems to be turning around a bit too much for something thats got heat shields on one side and is about to re-enter
T+45: flaps moved, maybe that is supposed to get it the right way round, I get it now - it uses the flaps to orient for re-entry
T+46: the little bits of debris must be tiles coming off
T+46: flap glowing red, can see plasma (edit: spacex tweeted a video of this bit, its quite something https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1768279990368612354
note the camera position moves because the camera is on one of the forward flaps)
T+47: "biggest flying object ever in space" uh-oh
T+47: serious re-entry flames
T+48: loss of signal
T+54: still no signal
T+62: saying they lost signal via starlink and TDRS at same time so maybe that was the end of it
I'm still in awe that I got to watch a reentry live stream just now. I wish I could tell my child self what wonders were in store. Watching humanity progress in real time is amazing.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome to watch "the first" of something! I wasn't born early enough to watch the moon landing, but I did watch the livestream of the first successful landing of a Falcon 9. Watching that bit of science fiction turn into reality was one of the more memorable moments of my life.
>T+46: the little bits of debris must be tiles coming off
Seemed like ice to me, which itself can be it a problem. The vehicle didn't seem very stable even before this point so I'm wondering if we're getting ice build up on the cold gas thrusters which changed the control dynamics keeping the ship from flying stably.
It looked to me like a good portion of the debris was in fact tiles. It also seemed to me that there were significant attitude control deviations, both of which might have been significant factors in the unplanned disassembly event.
Right after the engine cut-offs for the second stage from the first burn you can see at least one tile missing and during the burn before that I also saw some dark flecks fly off.
It certainly looked like there was either a fairly continuous firing of the cold gas thrusters, a stream from the second stage engines, or some atmospheric effects from being in such a low orbit.
