Watch SpaceX Starship Flight 6 Land in Stunning Buoycam Footage (Video)

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A camera mounted on a buoy in the Indian Ocean captured the end of SpaceX’s latest test flight, and it’s quite a sight to behold.

The suborbital flight, which launched from SpaceX Starbase in South Texas on November 19, sent the upper stage of the 165-foot (50-meter) Starship megarocket halfway around the world to a patch of the Indian Ocean off the northwest corner of the globe. coast of Australia.

The spacecraft made it through Earth’s atmosphere intact, maneuvering toward a gentle, controlled splashdown. And the buoy camera captured the dramatic event, SpaceX reported in a Nov. 22 X post.

“Spacecraft burning and splashing down in the Indian Ocean,” SpaceX wrote in a post that included 23 seconds of footage from the buoy’s camera.

The Nov. 19 test mission was the sixth for the fully-crewed Starship, which stands nearly 400 feet (122 m) tall and is the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built. Flight 6’s flight profile generally mirrored that of Flight 5, which occurred on 13 October.

However, there were some important differences. For example, Flight 5 took off in the morning Texas time and splashed down in the Indian Ocean at night local time. But Flight 6 took off in the late afternoon, resulting in a daylight splashdown. This was intended because SpaceX wanted to get a better look at the entry, descent and landing process.

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On Flight 5, Starship’s huge first stage booster, known as Super Heavy, returned to the launch pad, where it was snagged by the launch tower’s “chopsticks.”

This was also the plan for Flight 6, but a communication problem with the tower prevented an attempt to catch the chopsticks. Instead, Super Heavy switched to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX plans to eventually catch Super Heavy and the upper stage, called Starship or simply “Ship”, using chopsticks. This will speed up the process of testing and re-flying the fully reusable mega-rocket the company is developing to help humanity settle the Moon and Mars.