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.
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. Chinese-language reporting collected by Hardware Upgrade says LandSpace flew a dozen Osmo Action 6 units in metal housings and pulled the microSD cards after the stage was safed. DJI calls the project a joint rocket-mounted imaging test with LandSpace.
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 card inside it still reads afterward. It did. 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.
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.
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, Spaceflight Now, Hardware Upgrade
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
