Rocket launches are exciting. They are the very personification of what man is capable of doing and what he has achieved to bring humanity forward.
Seeing the rocket ignite with thousands of pounds of thrust to push the aircraft out of Earth’s atmosphere, every rocket launch video feels to be the most exhilarating as soon as the countdown starts.
ISRO
When you think about it, almost all the videos are of the rocket going from Earth to space. We never really get to see what it is like to be on the rocket when it enters space. Sure, some of SpaceX’s videos have shown the detachment process of one of its rockets and that’s surely cool. But we haven’t seen one from a third-person perspective.
However, today, while browsing on the internet, I stumbled upon a video which showed us what the rocket looks like when it leaves the Earth. While browsing through Twitter (as I regularly do) I stumbled upon this video shared online which shows a tiny spec of light (the rocket) coming from Earth, going past the airglow and then detaching itself from the booster.
If you hang around a while longer — say around 50 seconds you’ll see the detached module return to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. In case you didn’t know, that’s a very standard procedure. In fact, only the tiny top part of the rocket is the one which ends up in space, the rest contains the fuel to push the rocket out of Earth’s atmosphere which gets detached after use.
BBC
This video was surely breathtaking. However, I was curious to know which was the rocket in the video. A little digging and I found out that it was in fact a Russian space mission — Russian Progress 71 — essentially a cargo mission for the International Space Station. The video isn’t very recent. In fact, it’s nearly two years old. Yet it is nothing like we’ve ever seen before.
Watch the original video below: