You know you live in the space age when solar storms knock out farmers’ GPS-reliant tractors and a camera in Earth’s lofty orbit films a rocket launching through the atmosphere.
This camera attached to the International Space Station — the SpaceTV-1 instrument operated by the Earth-monitoring company Sen — captured the launch of SpaceX’s colossal Starship rocket on Nov. 19, the nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle’s sixth test flight. Such footage, showing the rocket’s plume from 250 miles up, is rare, if not unprecedented.
“This is believed to be the first time ever a rocket launch has been filmed in real time from space,” Getty Images posted online.
In the video below (which plays after a short ad), you can see the white plume appearing on the top of the screen at center-right at eight seconds into the video. The plume becomes more apparent as the footage progresses closer. (The plume is also pointed out in the post from Sen, below.) Starship launched from SpaceX‘s Starbase, located in Boca Chica, Texas, and the body of water below the plume is the Gulf of Mexico.
Some 65 minutes after liftoff, the Starship traveled around much of the world before intentionally splashing down in the Indian Ocean. The company’s ultimate goal, however, is to catch the rocket in giant mechanical arms at its Starbase, allowing for a rapid reuse and launch of the rockets.
Each of these test flights, of which there will be many more in 2025, are part of the company’s “rapid iterative development” of Starship, which, once it successfully launches cargo (and later crew), will become the largest and most powerful operational rocket on Earth, surpassing NASA‘s Space Launch System.
Already, Starship will play a significant role in the space agency’s Artemis mission, its endeavor to establish a permanent presence on the moon. The large spacecraft, for example, will provide a human landing system, or HLS, for when NASA astronauts return to the moon later this decade during the Artemis III mission.
