SpaceX video shows awesome view of Falcon 9 landing

By Trevor Mogg Published June 5, 2023

It’s nearly eight years since SpaceX achieved the first successful autonomous landing of its Falcon 9 rocket following a number of failed attempts.

Since then, the SpaceX team has perfected the maneuver, bringing back to Earth the first-stage booster shortly after launch so that it can be used multiple times in other missions. The focus on reusability is at the heart of SpaceX’s flight system as it drastically reduces flight costs and allows for a greater frequency of flights.

Recommended Videos

With every SpaceX mission, it’s hard to grow tired of seeing the 135.2-foot (41.2-meter) booster coming into land — upright and automatically — just a few minutes after launch.

The latest video (below), posted online by SpaceX on Sunday, shows a clearer-than-usual view of the landing spot on a barge waiting off the coast of Florida, filmed from the rocket as it descended at rapid speed.

The landing location is often obscured by clouds or poor light, but Sunday’s weather was perfectly clear, giving interested folks an excellent look at the final seconds of the booster’s latest mission.

Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship pic.twitter.com/bg6OerL9IG

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 4, 2023

SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 at 8:20 a.m. ET on Sunday, June 4. The mission launched 22 second-generation Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The satellites will be used for SpaceX’s internet-from-space service, which uses thousands of small satellites in low-Earth orbit to beam broadband to customers around the world.

The mission marked the third launch and landing for this particular Falcon 9 first-stage booster, which previously launched the Boeing-made SES O3b mPOWER communications satellite, and Crew-6 to the International Space Station in March.

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Topics

Space

Lightsails have hit another speed bump on the road to interstellar travel

The coolest interstellar travel idea may get betrayed by the light pushing it

LightSail in Earth orbit

Laser-powered lightsails are one of the coolest answers to spaceflight. It might not be as sci-fi-sounding as a warp drive, but now, its practicality has also come under question. Using lightsails, a spacecraft could unfurl an ultra-thin reflective sail and let a powerful laser push it toward another star, without relying on fuel.

The tech was simple and elegant--except it's also more complicated than it sounds. A new preprint from researchers Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology suggests that relativistic lightsails may run into a hidden propulsion problem once they start moving extremely fast.

Space

The galaxy has an exoplanet size mystery, and NASA’s EVE mission wants to solve it

This planet-hunting mission wants to catch baby worlds before they grow up

Artist’s Illustration of Exoplanets Orbiting Barnard’s Star

Mankind venturing into space ended up creating more questions than it answered, and one of the dilemmas is related to the planet sizes. Astronomers have found plenty of rocky super-Earths and plenty of puffier sub-Neptunes, but far fewer planets with a radius of about 1.8 times Earth’s.

That gap is known as the radius valley, and a proposed mission called the Early eVolution Explorer, or EVE, wants to figure out why it exists. NASA has a simple plan: look at planets while they are still young. The mission concept, detailed in a new arXiv preprint and covered by Phys.org, would focus on newly formed star clusters to see what small planets look like before billions of years of evolution.

Cars

We just got a hot signal that a Tesla and SpaceX merger could happen, after all

Tesla

For years, the idea of Tesla and SpaceX becoming a single company has lived somewhere between ambitious business theory and Elon Musk fan fiction. The two companies already share DNA, leadership influence, engineering talent, and long-term goals. But every time the topic surfaced, it felt more like an interesting thought experiment than a realistic possibility. Now, one of the most important people at SpaceX has added fresh fuel to the conversation.

Speaking in a recent CNBC interview, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell was asked about the possibility of closer ties between Tesla and SpaceX. Her response wasn’t a flat-out denial. In fact, she suggested that bringing the two companies together could make life a little easier for Musk. That may sound like an offhand comment, but coming from Shotwell, it’s noteworthy. She’s been at SpaceX since its earliest days and remains one of the company's most influential executives.