Elon Musk isn’t afraid to admit when things go wrong.
The SpaceX founder tweeted out a video on Thursday of the company’s rocket crashing as it attempted to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Looks like early liquid oxygen depletion caused engine shutdown just above the deck pic.twitter.com/Sa6uCkpknY
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 17, 2016
Of course, Iron Man, errr, Musk, shouldn’t feel too bad. SpaceX stuck three consecutive landings before Thursday’s fail — plus, the Falcon 9 rocket did accomplish its mission of launching two communications satellites into orbit.
Musk, who wants to put humans on Mars and thinks robots might kill us all, seemed to take the crash in stride.
RUD = Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly 🙂
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2016
That is probably because he knows that if he can successfully relaunch a rocket, SpaceX will have a serious leg up on the competition.
Currently, NASA and private spaceflight companies waste millions of dollars on each launch because the rockets are destroyed. Eventually, however, SpaceX wants to send a successfully landed Falcon 9 back into space. This was a step back, obviously. But it looks like Musk is staying optimistic.
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