Starship Flight 5 – Cinematic Experience

Starship Flight Test 5 is the 5th flight of Starship. Launched on 13 October 2024, Ship 30 (S30) and Booster 12 (B12) have been used for this mission.

Following the successful soft water landing of B11 on Flight 4, Elon Musk confirmed that they are planning a catch attempt on this flight.[1] This was also further confirmed in the flight 4 recap video from 4 July 2024.[2] In April 2024 and later in August 2024, significant upgrades were done to the chopsticks and the orbital launch mount to allow for a catch attempt.

Starship 12/30 lifted off from launch pad one (OLIT-1) at SpaceX’s Boca Chica Starbase launch site at 07:25 am CT. All 33 booster engines ignited. After hot staging, the ship continued towards space and the booster started its boost-back burn to get back to the launch site. SpaceX checked both the booster and the tower infrastructure and manually commanded Go for the catch attempt. The tower chopsticks successfully caught Booster 12 at 07:31, completing SpaceX’s first main goal for this launch. At 07:48, the Ship engines were shut down and S30 entered a roughly 25 minutes coast phase. After reentry, Ship 30 landed precisely on target in the Indian Ocean, which was SpaceX’s second main goal.[3] S30 blew up after tipping over in the ocean. If it hadn’t exploded, SpaceX would have planned to get some images from the heat shield tiles to assess their condition after reentry.

According to Elon Musk, the booster looked great after the catch, with a few outer engine nozzles “warped form heating & some other minor issues”[4], likely referring to a damaged chime amongst others.

Accompanying the test, SpaceX released a small Starship Web game.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_5