SpaceX recently shared an incredible 90-second video showing a rocket’s-eye view of a Falcon 9 booster from launch to landing. The sped-up footage went viral and has so far racked up 60 million views on Twitter alone.
Now the spaceflight company has released a similar video showing Sunday’s mission that involved its more powerful, triple-booster Falcon Heavy rocket.
But while the Falcon 9 video attached the camera to the first stage of the returning booster, this time SpaceX tracked the mission from the ground.
SpaceX landed two of the three boosters in Sunday’s satellite-deployment mission for the U.S. Air Force. The camera follows both boosters for some of the descent, before focusing on one of them for the landing.
The footage is sped up, compressing the boosters’ eight-minute flight into two minutes. You can watch it below:
Sped up tracking cam footage of Falcon Heavy from launch to landing pic.twitter.com/RKnRXEz7Gu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 16, 2023
The successful mission was the second for the Falcon Heavy since November 2022, and the fifth since its first liftoff in early 2018.
The Falcon Heavy is essentially three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together. Landing them back on the ground allows SpaceX to reuse the boosters for future flights, enabling it to cut the cost of space travel and offer better rates to customers who want to use its service to deploy satellites in space.
The two side boosters fell away minutes into the mission, while the core booster continued to power the payload to orbit and was not recovered.
SpaceX hopes to carry its landing technology to its next-generation rocket, comprising the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft. The Hawthorne, California-based company is planning to send the Super Heavy on its first orbital flight in the next couple of months, but there won’t be any attempt to land the booster or the spacecraft. Instead, the main aim is to test the flight systems and get the vehicle to orbit.
