Twelve stock DJI Osmo Action 6 cameras survived a rocket launch and a 500°C re-entry

Action cameras get strapped to some improbable things, but this is a first. On 19 August, twelve DJI Osmo Action 6 cameras were mounted on LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 reusable rocket for China’s first successful land-based orbital launch and recovery — and they came back working. You can watch the unedited single-shot footage of the entire journey on DJI’s YouTube channel. The detail that matters: no modifications The remarkable part is not that cameras flew on a rocket. It is that these were stock consumer cameras, mounted without any special modification to the cameras themselves. Consider what that means in practice. On the way up, the cameras endured the vibration and acoustic loading of a launch — which is violent enough to shake instruments apart — followed by the pressure and temperature swings of climbing out of the atmosphere. On the way back down, atmospheric re-entry generated temperatures reported at around 500°C...