Onboard SpaceX footage of rocket’s first stage landing

SpaceX has now managed to land the first stage of its satellite-launching rocket, the Falcon 9, four times in a row. Three of those landings amazingly have been on barges floating in the ocean. What better way to celebrate than to release footage of the most recent landing taken from the rocket’s onboard camera as it comes back to Earth? The footage has been sped up, so don’t be too impressed by the speed. There’s a lot of other things to be impressed about anyway.

You can see the black of space and the Earth’s crescent before the Falcon 9 descends through clouds, its metal fins flipping into place as it reorientates itself for a fiery touchdown. The footage was captured during the THAICOM 8 mission on May 27, 2016.

Apparently SpaceX is running out of storage space at the Kennedy Space Center. The hangar can only hold five rocket boosters, and with another successful landing, it’s at maximum capacity. Musk has stated that SpaceX may use some of the rockets at their facility in MCGregor, Texas, for testing purposes. The rockets that returned from higher geostationary orbits have received the most damage, so are likely to be the first to be used.