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Elon Musk's SpaceX Blooper Reel: 'It's Just a Scratch'

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By Laura Geggel
published

On Aug. 31, Musk announced on Twitter that he was "Putting together a SpaceX rocket-landing blooper reel. We messed up a lot before it finally worked, but there's some epic explosion footage …"

Musk delivered on that promise today (Sept. 14), with the debut of a video just over 2 minutes long that's filled with blowups set to the cheerful "Monty Python" theme song. [6 Ways Entrepreneur Elon Musk Is Changing the World]

The conflagrations really are like no other, and Elon insists that they're "just a scratch" or a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in some cases.

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Despite the flaming wreckage, the reel has a happy ending. SpaceX celebrated its first successful touchdown on land with its Falcon 9 rocket in December 2015 and its first successful drone-ship landing with a reusable Falcon 9 rocket booster in April 2016.

"You are my everything," Musk tells the rocket in the video. Talk about a love letter to space technology!

Successful rockets are all alike, but every unsuccessful rocket is unsuccessful in its own way. (Image credit: SpaceX/YouTube)

SpaceX may soon have enough successes to make an anti-blooper reel. In addition to its many accomplishments, including 16 successful rocket landings, the company launched the U.S. Air Force's unmanned X-37B space plane on a secret mission and aced the landing one week ago, according to Space.com, Live Science's sister site.

Original article on Live Science.

Laura Geggel
Laura Geggel
Editor

Laura is the archaeology and Life's Little Mysteries editor at Live Science. She also reports on general science, including paleontology. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.