Riding the Booster, Stunning Space Shuttle Launch Video

Did you ever want to know what it’s like to ride a rocket into space? This video is exactly that. For real. A sensory overloading intimate perspective of a Space Shuttle blasting into Earth’s upper atmosphere at 3000 miles an hour. And then what’s it like to let go and fall back down to Earth.

Riding the Booster: Up and Down in 400 Seconds is like a dashboard-cam-view from the rockets that powered Shuttles to space. Featuring high definition audio and video recorded by cameras mounted on Shuttle SRBs (solid rocket boosters). The footage is pulled from recordings of two shuttle launches (Atlantis in 2007 and Endeavour in 2009). The film starts just before launch, covers the ascent up to about 200,000 feet and then the “graceful tumble” as the SRBs fall back to Earth, into the sea actually, and awaiting pickup by the NASA team.

The video was posted in March 2012 by Michael Interbartolo who worked for a decade at Space Shuttle Mission Control. The 30-year Space Shuttle program was officially retired in 2011. In Fall 2011 we covered the final journey of the Shuttle Endeavour which took place much closer to Earth.

Interbartolo mentions this being an excerpt from an upcoming DVD called Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle. But that DVD doesn’t seem to exist yet (more than a year later). However there’s a related video with amazing ground-based footage of Shuttle launches (below). It features detailed commentary about the footage and was produced by NASA Glenn Research Center in 2010.