Watch SpaceX footage of Falcon Heavy from takeoff to landing

SpaceX recently shared an incredible 90-second video showing a rocket perspective of a Falcon 9 booster from takeoff to landing. The expedited footage went viral and has racked up 60 million views so far on Twitter alone.

Now the space company has released a similar video showing Sunday’s mission, which involved the more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket with three boosters.

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 mission for the US Air Force. The camera follows both boosters for part of the descent before focusing on one of them for landing.

Footage is accelerated, compressing the boosters’ eight-minute flight to two minutes. You can watch it below:

The successful mission was Falcon Heavy’s second since November 2022 and fifth since its first launch in early 2018.

The Falcon Heavy essentially consists of three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together. When they land back on the ground, SpaceX can reuse the boosters for future flights, reducing spaceflight costs and offering 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 propel the payload into orbit and was not recovered.

SpaceX hopes to transfer its landing technology to its next-generation rocket, which consists of the Super Heavy Booster and the Starship spacecraft. The Hawthorne, California-based company plans to send the Super Heavy on its first orbital flight in the next few months, but there will be no attempt to land the booster or the spacecraft. Instead, the focus is on testing the flight systems and getting the vehicle into orbit.

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