Wow... Just Wow... Again!

Starship Flight Test 5. This went beyond Wow, all the way to "Holy Crap!"  It's beyond testing a couple of things, and as far as I can tell, it met every objective. I was here to watch this and watched the whole coverage that SpaceX linked to on X. Full screen, 1080p video for just about all of it.

The quote SpaceX uses all the time is, "the payload for this flight is data;" the whole purpose is to examine changes made since the last test with a handful of milestones in mind. They're fond of saying that no matter what they try, only excitement is guaranteed. That was easily exceeded in IFT-5.

After a flawless liftoff and the couple of minutes until stage separation, followed by the return to the pad at Starbase Boca Chica, we saw this:

We've known about the plans to return to the Orbital Launch Mount and desire to catch the Super Heavy booster for years.  We've seen videos created by various folks depicting what it would look like. It didn't prepare me. I caught myself watching the seconds before that screen capture shown above quietly saying, "Holy Crap!" Many of us watch them land the boosters after a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launch and say it never gets old.  I think this is going to be the same way.

Bear in mind SpaceX made a video of all the failures on the way to their first successful Falcon 9 landing called "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" - a tribute both to their work and their sense of humor.  That video was made seven years ago. There are no scenes out of today's mission for a similar video on how to catch the world's most powerful rocket booster.  Around 500 tons worth of booster. 

As impressive as catching SuperHeavy in the air was, it was only half the mission. Starship was still flying a suborbital flight to the Indian Ocean, off the NW coast of Australia. Catching SuperHeavy was 6:55 into the mission, the splashdown into the ocean was almost exactly an hour later. The plasma and heating we'd seen on earlier missions was just as mind-boggling as before but the video didn't show the flap melting away as it did on IFT-4.  Don't forget that this is SpaceX.  They went to the spot in the ocean that they were aiming for and put some buoys with cameras on them to capture the splashdown.  This is just after the still extremely hot engine nozzles dumped into the ocean.

(Screen grab from Space.com VideoFromSpace)  Yes, it exploded. As one of the SpaceX announcers said, they didn't plan to recover any part of that Starship.  The video leading up to that moment is from a camera pointed down at the bottom of the Starship from the top.  The ocean surface becomes visible, then it apparently plunges into the ocean because the entire scene changes color. 

If you haven't seen the video of the whole mission, it's worth the time. A minute or three after Mechazilla catches the booster, they go about a half hour with no chatting or narration, starting up again at about T+40 minutes. Go pick a video presenter you like or go to SpaceX's video on their own servers. It's a historic mission.

A comment I read somewhere said that with this, mankind has become a space-faring civilization. That seems a bit of an overreach to me, but it certainly made the talk about flying unmanned Starships to Mars in 2026 and sending people by 2028 sound more likely.