“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating…”
On September 7, Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company SpaceX successfully ran another test-fire for its Falcon 9 rocket, achieving a perfect score for all nine of its landing attempts so far this year. However, this success streak rides on a baggage of epic misses and fails in the past. And, company’s founder Musk has no qualms in admitting them before the world. In fact, sticking to his “failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating…” stance, he has released a 2.09 minute-long blooper video that collates the firm’s failed attempts at rocket booster landings so far.
The video offers a peek into all that went wrong in SpaceX’s pursuit of turning the Falcon 9 into a mostly reusable booster, before finally succeeding in reusing rocket’s first stage. It shows a whole host of issues – engine sensor failures, a sticky throttle valve and exploding rockets – that obstructed Falcon 9’s booster landings.
The video, titled ‘How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster’, posted on YouTube on Thursday offers a series of serious challenges with a humorous twist. Driving home the light-hearted spirit of the SpaceX video is the background score of ‘Liberty Bell’ song, which also happens to be the theme song for Monty Python. The video comprises a string of small clips pertaining to key failed landing attempts, with an accompanying caption explaining the reason behind it.
The video shows a rocket booster exploding after a hard landing on water in September 2013, and then a booster falling apart after tipping in July 2014. One of the hilarious clips is of Elon Musk examining one of the exploded boosters. That the rocket booster exploded is not the funny part, of course. What makes the clip hilarious is Musk’s comment: ‘Rocket is fine? It’s just a scratch,’ even though it is in pieces.
The clip of a rocket booster exploding on the landing pad due to lack of hydraulic fluid is captioned, ‘Well, technically, it did land…just not in one piece.’ In April 2015, a stick throttle valve obstructed what could have been an upright landing. ‘Look, that’s not an explosion…it’s just a rapid unscheduled disassembly,’ the video says of the booster tipping over and exploding.
Even though SpaceX managed its first successful rocket landing in December 2015, the video skips that landmark and goes over the January 2016 fail where a landing leg collapsed at touchdown, once again leading to booster tipping over and exploding. It then showcases a landing engine burning, as the booster exploded after hitting the platform too quickly. The caption for this one read: ‘The course of true love never did run smooth.’ In another landing attempt made in May 2016, the booster can be seen jumping from the drone ship owing to a radar glitch. Yet another failed attempt from June 2016 shows the booster running out of propellant.
It then goes on to showcase the successful landing on a drone ship from April 2016, which has been captioned, ‘You are my everything.’
Musk had hinted at the arrival of this blooper reel a week prior to its release. “Putting together SpaceX rocket landing blooper reel. We messed up a lot before it finally worked, but there’s some epic explosion footage,” he had said.
Well, you can never go wrong with a good sense of humor, and that’s not rocket science.
I am linking the video (Source: SpaceX) below in case you wanna check out:
