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Often compared to Tony Stark, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, has quite the vision of the future. Unlike many individuals with lots of money and dreams, Musk actually uses that money to try and fulfill those visions. One such vision with his company SpaceX has been to bring reusable rockets to the space exploration industry. While SpaceX had attempted to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket several times with catastrophic failure, on April 8th the company finally succeeded, landing the 14-story Falcon 9 on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, almost perfectly on target.

Since April 8th the science and tech communities have been buzzing, posting videos, and images of the event all over social media. I have probably personally watched the video of the landing two dozen times in amazement, and have sifted through image after image constantly looking for new angles. Well today SpaceX has released the grandaddy of them all, a 360-degree video of the historic barge landing on Youtube for everyone to watch in awe. The video clip, which is just under 40 seconds in length, allows someone on a PC or laptop to scroll within the video itself to change the viewing angle in any direction, allowing one to feel that they are actually experiencing the event from the barge itself. On a smartphone the video is even more immersive in that a user can simply move the phone in any direction and the viewing angle immediately changes to that direction. While true immersive virtual reality via a stereoscopic view is not available for this particular video, I’m sure that in the future SpaceX will begin filming events like this in a VR compatible format.

You have to love the fact that a company that’s so important to the future of space travel is making such content publicly available, hopefully drawing in new interest to the industry. Although I kind of wish that they would have uploaded similar 360-degree videos for the rockets which had catastrophically exploded at landing, I’m sure there will be plenty of future 360-degree content released by the company as new tests are performed. Check out the full 360-degree clip below and let us know your thoughts on the video and the technology in the SpaceX Falcon 9 Landing forum on VRTalk.com.