Today on the 13th october 2024 at 7 am central time starship was ready to launch for the 5th time. The countdown proceeded smoothly without any holds, and at liftoff, all 33 Raptor engines ignited successfully. Already the lift of was visually really impressive with the rising sun in the background.
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2 minutes into flight, from the camera pointing down the booster, green and blue exhaust gases could be observed.
At minute 2:35 hot staging was sucessfully performed, with  the engines cutting off as palnned. Also the boostbackburn and the boostback shutdown were performed without any issues. At the same time all 6 engines of starship were ignited.
On the ground a new tracking camera was installed, which captured the complete descent of the booster back to earth, also one could see the aerodynamic interaction with the surrouding air.  At 4 minutes and 40 second there was an object visible extremely close to the booster this was probably the hotstaging ring, fortunately it didn’t intercept with the booster.
 
During flight, it was checked if the tower is ready for the catch attempt, and also the booster data was analysed to see If there were any issues, which could lead to a catch failure. At minute 5:10 it was finally confirmed that a signal had been sent to the booster, to go on to the trajectory, back to the launch tower.
From the view from the ground camera one could see that the engine site of the booster was glowing red hot.
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Then at 1 km height and with a velocity of 1030 kilometers per hour, the 13 center engines were ignited for the catch attempt. During the startup a small fire near the engines appeared, also the booster seemed to come in a bit too fast. But in the end the boosted touched down with a velocity of only 1 kilometer per hour, so a perfectly soft landing. This was really a historic moment, spacex catched the massive booster on the first try. This is a major success for spacex, now the booster can be inspected for any issues and necessary changes for the next flight can be made. Also the catch tower is completely intact, so its basically ready for the next launch.
The small fire mentioned in the beginning, was extingushed fairly quickly and the booster was safely vented.
At the same time starship was successfully inserted into its orbit and entered a 30 minute coasting phase. Then at 40 minutes the reentering phase started, in the last flight, flight 4, in this phase one of the flaps melted thorugh the extreme heating. For this flight, SpaceX made the necessary adjustments to prevent that.
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At 46 minutes the first appearance of plasma was seen. Again a nice color play could be observed with Pink and Green flames. The upgraded heat shielding proved effective, as no immediate damage was seen.
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But later at 59 minutes and in 51 km height, starship slowed faster down through the thicker atmosphere, the higher drag caused one flap to melt slightly again. While this affected the flight trajectory slightly, it didn’t have any major impact.
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Then the flip manouver was iniated at about 1 km height and with a speed of 340 kilometrs per hour. The 3 sea level engines ignited and starship made a somewhat soft splash down on the water, which was also visible in the last frames.
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Then the stream switched over to a near by camera which was installed on a flotation device, the camera captured how starship tipped over and exploded.
The camera was installed near the expected touchdown location, therefore the landing was really close to the intended target.
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After this major success, I believe that Starship’s next launch will be in the near future—and likely another success. With the booster caught and ready for inspection, SpaceX can make further improvements to the next booster, pushing the technology even further.
/Outro