When SpaceX last launched their Dragon cargo ship to the International Space Station on their Falcon 9, they attempted to soft land the first stage booster propulsively. Since this was just a test, they brought it back over the Atlantic Ocean. Despite very stormy weather, they succeeded! There was a camera looking down the side of the booster as it came down toward the water; unfortunately, the video that was received was in very poor condition; here is the RAW footage and SpaceX’s attempt at repairing it:
SpaceX put the RAW video up on their website and wrote:
In an effort to see if the video can be improved further, below are links to both the original data file as well as the repaired source file. The file labeled “raw.ts” is an extraction of the raw MPEG bitstream from the rocket. Our software team attempted to repair the data, resulting in the “repair1.ts” file, and the partial video above. We welcome anyone to download the raw file to make improvements directly—if you are successful, please feel free to post your video at: http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/24bsn2/first_stage_landing_video/.
Volunteers at NasaSpaceflight.com took up the challenge and have made amazing progress in recovering usable video; see the dramatic improvement in the video thus far (and they’re not done yet!):