A Chinese Satellite Just Watched OneSpace Launch a Rocket, and the Video Is Awesome

Truly god view, Jilin-1 video satellite shot @OneSpace01 OS-X1 suborbital rocket’s launch at JSLC this noon. pic.twitter.com/KposRHZc4D

— dafeng cao (@dafengcao) September 7, 2018

You’ve likely never seen a rocket launch quite like this. When the Chinese commercial spaceflight startup OneSpace launched a rocket test flight Friday (Sept. 7), a satellite was watching. The result: One amazing video. 

The video shows OneSpace’s OS-X1 rocket blast off from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert during a suborbital test of the solid-fueled booster. It was captured by China’s Jilin-1 satellite in orbit 332 miles (535 kilometers) above Earth and shared on the country’s social media site Weibo, according to China’s GB Times. Twitter user Dafeng Cao then shared the video on Twitter, where it has been viewed more than 23,000 times. 

“At 12:10:03 on September 7, 2018, One Space commercial sub-orbital rocket OS-X1 was successfully launched at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The rocket can provide a flight speed of Mach 4.5 for the load,” OneSpace representatives wrote on Twitter. “This is the second successful launch of this series of rockets.”

Friday’s test flight reached an altitude of 21.7 miles (35 kilometers) and lasted 200 seconds, according to the GB Times. As OneSpace’s Twitter update noted, it was the second launch of an OS-X rocket. The first lifted off on May 22.

OneSpace’s OS-X rocket is a 30-foot-tall (9 meters) rocket designed to allow customers to test technologies and fly research experiments into suborbital space. It is the first of a planned family of OneSpace rockets that will eventually launch payloads into orbit.

The Beijing-based OneSpace is aiming to launch its first orbital flight of its larger OS-M booster later this year, the company has said. 

The Jilin-1 satellite that recorded Friday’s OneSpace test flight launched in October 2015. Jilin-1 is an Earth observation satellite, and became China’s first commercial high-resolution optical imaging satellite when it launched into orbit.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.