Horizon Flight 9

Horizon V5 is a fully reusable rocket designed by Horizon Aerospace capable of delivering more than 1 million pounds in to LEO in its fully reusable configuration. ( I think it can actually deliver 2 million pounds to LEO in its reuse configuration.

As you know the Horizon has been in testing for a long time as this is the fifth version. Here's a quick overview on the past 4 versions, V1 flew on flight 1, V2 flew on flight 2,3, and 4, V3 flew on flight 5,6,7, and V4 flew on flight 8. V4 is the only one to have 0 successes besides getting off the ground, which only one of the 3 v4 ships did, as two blew up on the ground and one blew up in space, so yeah not many successes for that one.
But it is now finally time to talk about Flight 9, it was originally intended to have a catch attempt of the booster, but it was canceled a few days before launch after the catch arms suffered damage during stacking.

Flight 9 overview
Flight 9 lifted off at 6:55 PM CT from our pad 4. All 32 engines ignited at liftoff and lifted the beast off the pad. Shortly after Max-Q one of the middle ring engines flamed out leaving the booster 31/32. At 8km the beautiful vapor cone appeared on the top of the rocket.
At 140 km the vehicles performed their hotstaging procedures and separated nominally, however the booster lost another engine on the boostback relight.
To compensate for the engine loss the booster performed a longer boostback burn sending it on a trajectory into the middle of the ocean.
The ship lit it's 8 Vac engines at hotstaging and separated nominally.
Seco came and went smoothly.
For the first time for the Horizon boosters they will not perform a entry burn and instead just tank the heat from reentry.
One main thing is for both landing burns on this mission were programed to not use as much thrust as a real mission would use, this is mainly to make sure that the booster and ship will not survive the impact and will sink to the bottom of the ocean. The booster began its landing burn and performed its
hard splashdown.

The ship deployed its dummy payload and got ready for reentry. Finally reentry came and went smoothly. At 1200 meters the landing burn began and the ship performed a successful hard splashdown.

When flying this for yourself, you may need to to do few tries as the booster tends to love to lose attitude control on the landing burn. Also when the booster starts to move into its landing position while in space, fast forward by 3x until the booster correctly moves into its attack angle.

Well enjoy this rocket.

I am planning to make a V6 at some point, but that would be months from now, so if I did make it this year, it would be very very late December when it comes out.

Im not going to post an expendable version of the V5, because I dont know what payload you need in orbit that weighs 4 million pounds.