SpaceX's Falcon 9 camera captures exciting launch to orbit and a flawless landing; WATCH

Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its first mission of the year on January 3 after clocking in record-breaking successful missions in 2022 (61). The company launched its Falcon 9 rocket from the Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station with 114 payloads. Like every other mission, the first stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket successfully pushed the second stage into orbit and returned for a flawless landing on the Landing Zone 1.

A couple days after the successful launch, SpaceX shared another exciting video, this time recorded from the camera attached to the first-stage booster. Check out the video below. The camera captures the booster's launch from SLC-40 all the way to its maximum altitude and its return to Earth for a precise landing. In the timelapse video, the booster can be seen climbing to the low-Earth orbit (LEO) before it performs a flip maneuver following stage separation and heads for a landing. The thrilling clip clearly shows the booster firing its thrusters during entry burn to reduce its descent speed while the wafer-like grid fins steer the booster to align it for landing at the Landing Zone 1. 

The recent launch was for the Transporter-6 mission, which was the sixth rideshare mission conducted by SpaceX. According to the company, this booster used for Transporter-6 had previously flown 14 times before January 3 as it supported GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34 and 10 Starlink missions.

Transporter-6 had a wide range of payloads that included CubeSats, microsats, picosats, and orbital transfer vehicles carrying spacecraft to be deployed at a later time. The primary payload was the satellite named EOS SAT-1, which has been developed by EOS Data Analytics (EOSDA). It is the first in the constellation of seven satellites and has been deployed to scan roughly one million square kilometres of land to determine the health of crops.