Watch SpaceX's Starship come down for nighttime splashdown during epic test flight (video)

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SpaceX has given us another angle on the epic fifth test flight of its Starship megarocket.

The company made history on that Oct. 13 mission, catching Starship's Super Heavy first-stage booster with the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower about seven minutes after liftoff.

But Starship's 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage — known as Starship, or just Ship — aced its return to Earth as well. It came down for a pinpoint splashdown halfway around the world from its South Texas launch site, as a newly released video from SpaceX shows.

a rocket comes down for a splashdown in the ocean at night

"Starship flip maneuver and landing burn on its fifth flight test. Vehicle improvements ensured flaps were protected from high heating, resulting in a controlled entry and high-accuracy splashdown at the targeted area in the Indian Ocean," SpaceX wrote in a Friday (Oct. 18) post on X that shared the 21-second video.

That video was taken from the ocean's surface, from a buoy or other bobbing object, as SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk noted in a jokey reply to the company's post.

"Oh buoy, what a great video!" Musk wrote on X on Friday.

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There may not be many more ocean splashdowns in Ship's future. SpaceX plans to bring the upper stage as well as Super Heavy back for launch-tower landings in the future — something that seems quite achievable given the performance on Flight 5, according to Musk.

"Starship achieved a precise, soft landing in the ocean, paving the way for return to launch site and being caught by the tower arms, like the booster. Full & rapid reusability improves the cost of access to orbit & beyond by >10,000%. It is the fundamental technology breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary and for us to become a true spacefaring civilization," the billionaire entrepreneur wrote in another Friday X post.

As that post notes, SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity settle the moon and Mars. The company believes that its combination of brawn and full, rapid reusability can help make such long-held dreams come true.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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