Old video of Atlas V launch in U.S. falsely linked to Chandrayaan-3

Context

India launched its third moon mission, Chandrayaan-3, on July 14 from Sriharikota—an island in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Following the failure of Chandryaan-2 in 2019, Chandryaan-3 is Indian Space Research Organisation or ISRO’s second attempt at soft landing a robotic instrument on the lunar surface.

After the launch, several videos claiming to show Chandrayaan-3 on its way to the moon have flooded social media. One such video shows an aerial view of a rocket launch captured from an airplane. Towards the start of the clip, a voice can be heard, presumably of the pilot, announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a launch at the left back,” after which the camera zooms in and captures the spacecraft's trajectory more closely. A tweet sharing this video with the caption, “Beautiful view of Chandrayaan-3” had garnered over 355,000 views. The archive of the post can be found here.

However, this video does not show the launch of Chandrayaan-3.

In Fact

On running a reverse image search on the video’s keyframes, we came across a slightly longer version of the viral video uploaded on YouTube by the channel ‘VideoFromSpace.’ The description of this video, which was shared on on May 22, 2021, states that it shows the raw footage of the Atlas V launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It also notes that this footage was captured mid-air by photographer Andy Lin during a flight from New York to Cancun on May 18, 2021.

Andy Lin had shared the same video on Twitter on May 19, 2021. Lin tweeted that he was able to capture the footage when his “plane happened to be flying by Cape Canaveral during the Atlas V launch.” In reply to a comment to his post, he also said that he was flying from John F Kennedy Airport to Cancun on a Delta flight. We have reached out to Lin for confirmation and will update the story if and when we receive a response.

The same video was also included in reports by multiple websites, such as Space.com. In its report, Space.com mentioned that “it was pure chance that the Atlas V rocket lifted off at 1:37 p.m. EDT, just as the plane was over coastal Florida.”

According to the official website of United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Atlas V 421 rocket launched SBIRS GEO Flight 5, a “missile detection and early warning satellite for the U.S. Space Force Space and Missile Systems Center” on May 18, 2021. According to ULA, the liftoff happened from the Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

We also geolocated the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Google Earth and compared its aerial view with the viral clip. We could easily spot the triangular coastline visible in the viral video. Sriharikota, on the other hand, has a relatively straight coastline.

The Verdict

The video shows the launch of the Atlas V rocket carrying the SBIRS Geo Flight 5 missile-warning satellite for the U.S. Space Force on May 18, 2021. It was captured by a passenger flying over Florida at the time of the launch. We mark the claim false as that video is not of Chandrayaan-3.