DJI has published the full, uncut flight of an Osmo Action 6 riding the first stage of LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 rocket, from ignition on the pad to a vertical touchdown in China’s Gansu Province. The video went up on DJI’s YouTube channel on August 24, five days after the August 19 launch that made LandSpace the first Chinese commercial company to land an orbital-class booster on legs.
The camera is a stock consumer action cam. It sells on Amazon in the United States for $426 as of this afternoon, sold by DJI Gear Center, even though DJI never officially launched the product here. I covered that odd US exclusion when the Action 6 debuted in November, and this rocket footage is the loudest answer yet to the question of whether the camera was worth chasing through third-party channels.
The clip runs liftoff to touchdown as one continuous first-person shot, with the rocket’s red body filling the lower frame and the pad falling away beneath it. DJI’s own summary is four words long: liftoff to touchdown, press play.
Updated August 25 with DJI’s press release on the flight, which confirms twelve cameras and puts a temperature figure on the claim.
LandSpace landed its Zhuque-3 booster on the second try
LandSpace launched the Zhuque-3 Y2 mission from the Dongfeng commercial launch zone in northwest China at 7:35 a.m. local time on August 19, 7:35 p.m. Eastern the evening before. The second stage carried the Honghu 03 satellite to orbit while the first stage flew back to Minqin County, Gansu Province.
Stage separation came roughly 137 seconds after liftoff. The booster then ran the full recovery sequence, a high-altitude flip, a reentry burn, an aerodynamic glide, a landing burn, and leg deployment, and touched down a little under eight minutes after launch, according to Spaceflight Now’s mission report. Social media clips showed a fire in the aft section after touchdown. LandSpace called the mission “China’s first successful booster recovery on land.”
The first Zhuque-3 flight in December 2025 reached orbit but lost the booster to what Xinhua described as abnormal combustion during descent. For the second flight LandSpace cut the number of engines used in the landing burn, redesigned the thermal protection at the base of the stage, and added a predicted-impact-point function to the flight termination system. The 76.6-meter (251-foot) stainless steel rocket burns liquid methane through nine Tianzhi engines, and stands taller than a Falcon 9.
The Osmo Action 6 went along for all of it, bolted to the outside of that first stage.
DJI recovered the footage from the landed booster, not by downlink
The video was not streamed from the rocket. DJI put a number on it in an August 25 press release: twelve Osmo Action 6 units, mounted at different positions on the stage, recording to their own storage. The data came back on the cameras, not over the air.
That detail matters more than it sounds. A camera that survives ignition, max-Q, stage separation, a reentry burn and a landing burn only counts if the storage inside it still reads afterward. It did, twelve times over. DJI says the stage passed through a communications blackout on the way down, which is the argument for onboard recording over a downlink: nothing to lose when the link drops. A sped-up cut circulated within a day of the landing, and the full-length ride followed on August 24 with DJI’s title “You asked for the full ride. Here it is.”
The audio is the sleeper. Commenters on the video flagged that the sound thins out as the stage climbs, which is what a microphone should record as air pressure drops, and one pointed to the engine valves closing at the 2:20 mark. That is a $426 camera’s built-in mic doing acoustic telemetry on a methane rocket.
The camera itself is unchanged from the one Shawn covered in his Osmo Action 6 long-term review: a 1/1.1-inch square sensor, a variable f/2.0 to f/4.0 aperture, 50 GB of internal storage, and a rating to -20°C (-4°F). DJI’s spec sheet says nothing about rocket exhaust. DJI’s own description of the stunt carries the line “Filmed under authorization. Do not attempt,” which is doing a lot of work for a product page.
DJI’s 500°C figure describes the rocket body, not the camera
DJI headlined its August 25 release on the flight with the camera “Surviving 500°C Return to Earth.” Further down, the same release says the 400 to 500°C (750 to 930°F) range is what aerodynamic heating does to the rocket body’s surface during ascent and return. Those are different measurements.
DJI rates the Action 6 for stable operation between -20°C and 45°C (-4°F and 113°F). That figure sits on DJI’s own spec page and has not changed. The release never says what temperature the cameras themselves reached, where on the stage each one sat relative to the hottest surfaces, or what stood between them and the heat.
DJI’s own press images answer that last one.
The cameras flew inside heat-shielded ceramic housings, and the one in that photo came back charred. So the claim that the cameras went up without modification is true and narrower than it first reads: a housing is hardware around the camera, not a change to it. What the housing absorbed and what the camera behind it actually saw are the numbers DJI left out.
The rest of the technical detail holds up against DJI’s published specs. The 1/1.1-inch square sensor, 4K/120fps capture and 13.5 stops of dynamic range in the release all match the numbers DJI put out when the camera launched in November. DJI also credits its stabilization for keeping the frame steady through the stage’s attitude changes, which is the one claim in the release the footage lets you judge for yourself.
Alongside the rocket cameras, DJI says it ran a ground and air package at the site: the Mavic 4 Pro, the Matrice 4TD for thermal, the Avata 360, the Osmo Pocket 4P, and the Osmo 360 II, which DJI has now dated for a September 3 global launch with no US price attached. An American reading that list will recognize a familiar problem: most of it is hard or impossible to buy here through official channels.
Amazon sells the Osmo Action 6 in the US even though DJI does not
Americans can buy the camera today. The Essential Combo lists at $426 on Amazon, in stock, shipped by Amazon and sold by DJI Gear Center, with the Standard Combo at $436 and bigger bundles at $476 and $496. The listing shows 500-plus sold in the past month across 2,088 ratings.
That is not how DJI planned it. When the Osmo Action 6 launched on November 18, DJI left the United States off the official market list, with a spokesperson citing “evolving local conditions.” The Standard Combo went on sale in Europe at €379, roughly $409 at the time. The US Amazon price today sits about $27 above that, for a product DJI’s own US store did not carry at launch.
Rafael Suárez covered the 8K firmware update in December, and Jake Sloan put the camera head to head with GoPro’s newest in GoPro Mission 1 Pro vs DJI Osmo Action 6. Neither piece had a rocket in it.
DroneXL’s Take
This is the best product video DJI has ever made, and what sells it is restraint. DJI let the footage run at real speed with the real audio and no music track, which is a confidence move most camera brands cannot bring themselves to make.
Action camera marketing has spent more than a decade on mountain bikes and surfboards. A rocket that lands is a different category of proof, and it cannot be faked on a budget.
The part I keep coming back to is the US angle. DJI would not put this camera on its own American storefront, citing conditions it declined to name, and now its best advertisement is a Chinese rocket on a Chinese pad, with footage that Americans will share while buying the product from a third-party seller. The last time a rocket showed up in DroneXL’s coverage it was SpaceX using drones to herd crowds away from a Starship launch. This time the camera is the payload. My read is that the exclusion was never about the camera’s prospects here: the listing moved 500-plus units last month before the full ride went up.
The 500°C headline is the one part I would push back on, and I say that as someone who just called this the best ad DJI has run. DJI had a genuine engineering result here: twelve mass-market cameras, violent vibration, a blackout on the way down, and every file readable on the ground. That story did not need a number lifted off the rocket’s skin and re-pointed at the camera. Publish what the cameras logged, or say they were shielded and by how much. The footage was already the proof.
Yes, the camera is Chinese and the rocket is Chinese, and the FCC is weighing an import and marketing ban on foreign drones in PS Docket 26-189. That proceeding targets drones. This is an action camera. I will keep watching the September 2 comment deadline on that docket, because definitions are where scope creep starts, but as of today the Osmo Action 6 is legal, in stock, and the best advertisement DJI has run in years.
Sources: DJI on YouTube, DJI Europe press release, Osmo Action 6 specifications, Spaceflight Now, Hardware Upgrade
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
