First-Person View of a Rocket Falling From Space

Ever wonder what it would be like to be inside a rocket falling to Earth? Look no further than this video from SpaceX, which affixed a GoPro to a fairing inside its Falcon 9 rocket to capture beautiful footage of its descent (set to "Blue Danube," naturally).

SpaceX designed the two-stage Falcon 9 to take satellites and the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. (The goal is to make the booster stage of the rocket reusable; the company came incredibly close to that goal in an April 2015 test. Fairings might one day be reusable, too.) The rocket has already made a number of successful resupplying missions to the International Space Station, and is currently testing the Dragon to carry astronauts into space—which means that humans could experience this spectacular view firsthand as early as 2017.

SpaceX CEO/CTO Elon Musk doesn't just want to send people into orbit; he also hopes to put humans on the red soil of Mars. "I think we’ve got a decent shot of sending a person to Mars in about 11 or 12 years," he told astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in April. In a Reddit AMA, he said he's hoping to debut his Mars Colonial Transporter toward the end of 2015. "The Mars transport system will be a completely new architecture," he said. "Good thing we didn't do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon."

[h/t Business Insider]