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

On November 26, 2024By Pranco

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

That suborbital flight, launched from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas on November 19sent the 50 meter high upper stage of the Starship mega rocket halfway around the world, towards a part of the Indian Ocean off the northwestern coast of Australia.

The spacecraft survived The Earth’s atmosphere in one piece, maneuvering to a soft, controlled splash. And the buoycam captured this dramatic action, as SpaceX revealed in a X post on November 22.

Water-level view of a large silver spacecraft coming down for a vertical splash in the ocean — The upper stage of SpaceX’s sixth Starship megarocket will crash into the Indian Ocean on November 19, 2024. (Image credit: SpaceX)

“Starship lands burning and crashes in Indian Ocean,” SpaceX wrote in the post, which contained 23 seconds of buoycam footage.

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

However, there were some important differences. For example, Flight 5 launched from Texas in the morning and landed in the Indian Ocean at midnight local time. But Flight 6 took off in the late afternoon, leading to a landing in daylight. This was by design because SpaceX wanted to get a better view of reentry, descent and landing.

During Flight 5, Starship’s massive booster known as Super Heavy maneuvered its way back to the launch site, where it captured by the “chopsticks” arms of the launch tower.

That was also the plan during Flight 6, but a communication problem with the tower prevented an attempt to capture chopsticks. Super Heavy was instead diverted to perform a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX plans to eventually capture both Super Heavy and the upper stage, called Starship or simply ‘Ship’, with the chopstick arms. This will speed up the inspection and relighting process of the fully reusable mega rocket, which the company is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars.