SpaceX's Starship Prototype Takes To The Skies And Returns Safely

After A week of preparation the latest Starship Prototype SN15 successfully demonstrated the complete landing maneuver required for Starship to operate. The flight was mostly hidden behind a layer of clouds which blocked cameras on the ground, and because the onboard cameras weren't delivering video data as expected.
However after a flight to 10 kilometers and a descent in a high drag belly flop orientation the vehicle relit its engines, returned to the vertical and carefully came to a stop on the landing pad.

Trevor Mahlmann

Title Crawl music by BrickTrick

[domoredujordan]

Spacex spoils us. People been waiting decades to get to something like this, meanwhile we get a treat every month or so. What a time.

[arnoldsherrill]

The definition of the phrase" falling with style" just got an upgrade . as a old-school space nerd I got Shivers watching this ., and it was worth every second

[YourMCAdmin]

I giggled so hard at "sample text"

[biovmr]

Looking forward to the upcoming sequels: "A Booster Awakens", "Return of the Orbital", "The Last Prototype", and of course, "The Rise of Marswalker".

[typograf]

To boldly go where no grain silo has gone before! Impressive.

[blackfoxnz]

Love the Star Wars style intro. Fits so perfectly

[Cam]

"In a music library far far away from Disney copyrights" 😂😂😂 made me forget about the video entirely because I laughed so hard

[pythosdegothos]

I am surprised at how many have forgotten, SN15 did its feat on the anniversary of Alan Shepherd's hop into space.

[_hench__]

I love how Starship has indeed been a Kerbal-esque trial and error process to success

[jardelelias]

This is a great opportunity for SpaceX to take a look at hardware that actually had flown. I can only imagine how much valuable information SN15 can still give them.

[DraconianEmpath]

That opening text crawl was SO GOOD. it was more star-wars like than some of the later star-wars opening text crawls...

[squirrelpower]

This was one of things my Dad always wanted to see the U.S. accomplish - a ship landing comic book style on it's take-off stage. Sadly he didn't live long enough to see it happen. Little did he know that it would end up being a private firm in the USA, and on top of that testing it in his home state of Texas.

[robinblankenship]

This HUGE thing just falling out of the clouds and landing softly was awe inspiring.

[tomoakhill]

Thank you Scott. I rely on you for accurate, timely news about spaceflight research.

I was blindsided by SpaceX. The first report of their existence that I got was April 13, 2015 the day before the failed Flight 17 soft landing attempt on the ocean drone ship. Then a mere 8 months later SpaceX succeeded on December 21, 2015 in making history’s first controlled vertical landing of a space rocket.

Yikes! I can not possibly describe what emotions I feel seeing this video. I am 70. I watched, live, every manned United States space flight from Alan Shepard through the last moon landing. I literally waited 55 years for a space rocket to descend on a pillar of fire to a soft landing. Now six years later I see a successful test of a soft landing of a rocket which is being designed for interplanetary human flight.

[jacquesloveridge]

Hopefully space x will pull the footage from the sd cards from the cams on sn15 and upload it on to YT.

[topsecret]

Honestly, the clouds where they were (maybe just a little bit higher at 1km) made the entire experience seem more cinematic. Seeing it flip right as it passes through the sky as shown in CosmicPerspective’s footage was extremely cool.

[NORKIE]

vlc is the most underrated media player of all time, it is simply the best at what it does.

[steve_rivers]

The irony that this knock off crawl was more concisely and intelligently written than the last 3 SW movies was not lost on me.

[whitlockbr]

Star Ship: a new hop. Revenge of the fifth! George is working on it right now.

[OneCupOfCoffee]

Scott, seriously well done!
The best part about this is that they actually have something to examine and pull useful data from.