The biggest rocket ever built cuts quite a figure when it flies, even as seen from space.
That rocket, SpaceX’s 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship, launched for the sixth time ever on Nov. 19, lifting off from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas.
The International Space Station (ISS) just happened to be passing overhead at the time. Astronaut Don Pettit snapped some nice shots of the launch, which was also captured by 4K cameras on the station’s exterior operated by the Earth-imaging company Sen.
Other ISS cameras were trained on Starship, too, it turns out. On Wednesday (Dec. 4), NASA’s ISS account posted on X a nearly three-minute video showing the plume created by the massive rocket as it roared off its seaside pad.
Related: What’s next for SpaceX’s Starship after its successful 6th test flight?
SpaceX is developing Starship to help get people to the moon and Mars, a goal that NASA is working toward as well. Indeed, Starship is part of the agency’s lunar plans: The agency selected the giant, fully reusable vehicle to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration.
If all goes to plan, Starship will put NASA astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time in late 2026, on the Artemis 3 mission.
Starship performed well on its sixth flight. Both of the rocket’s stages — a booster known as Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft called Starship, or simply Ship — aced their water landings, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian Ocean, respectively.
The flight plan originally called for Super Heavy to come back to Starbase for a catch by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms, as it did on Flight 5 in October. But SpaceX had issues communicating with the tower and called off the attempt on Flight 6.
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