Wondered what it was like to land a rocket? Here’s an onboard SpaceX rocket video of their most recent landing. Via the Verge:
Hours ago, SpaceX landed the first stage of one of its Falcon 9 rockets. It was the third time in a row that the company has landed one of these rocket boosters on a drone ship at sea, and the fourth overall.
The landings aren’t the only thing SpaceX is getting better at though — just now, the company posted this truly incredible footage of the landing taken from onboard the rocket. At the start, we watch the rocket booster use its metal fins to reposition itself in order to head back to Earth, then we get to see the engines make a controlled burn that slows the rocket’s descent. The footage is sped up, so just moments later, the drone ship appears out of nowhere in the ocean while the rocket touches down.
It’s the kind of media that, in the past, would have taken days for SpaceX to release. And it’s not even the first thing the company released — SpaceX also posted a short snippet of slow-motion footage to Instagram (seen below), and has already started uploading photos of the mission to the company’s Flickr page. Elon Musk’s space company is definitely getting good at sending rockets the size of skyscrapers to space and bringing them back safely, but it’s getting even better at showing off.
And so it should.