SpaceX Launch Failures, Rockets Exploding: Elon Musk Shares Video Compilation [WATCH]

While SpaceX has had a string of successes landing its Falcon 9 rockets on floating barges in the ocean and on land, the private space company has had its share of failures as well. And CEO Elon Musk shared previously unseen footage late Wednesday night that is a compilation of explosive videos of the rocket landings gone wrong.

Titled “How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster,” the clip is set to a piece of U.S. military march music called “Liberty Bell” which was composed by John Philip Sousa in 1893 and made famous by Monty Python.

Starting with an attempted ocean barge landing in September 2013, the SpaceX clip goes through a series of other explosive failures and the accompanying text provides a brief explanation for what went wrong in each of the instances. Some of the explanations, however, are clearly meant to have more of a comic effect than to actually provide technical or scientific information.

There is, for example, a rocket booster landing attempt from August 2014 which failed due to a malfunctioning engine sensor. As the footage moves from it bursting into a jagged ball of flames in the sky to Musk surveying the burning debris on the ground, the text says, presumably in his voice: “Rocket is fine?” and then answers the question with: “It’s just a scratch.” That is another possible reference to a Monty Python character, the Black Knight from the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Another failed landing is captioned: “Well, technically, it did land… just not in one piece.” Yet another says: “Look, that’s not an ‘explosion.’ It’s just a rapid unscheduled disassembly.” And in the realm of nerdy jokes, there is also another gem from a January 2016 failure during which a landing leg collapsed: “Entropy… is such a lonely word.”

There is also a reference to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with a quote from the play overlaid on an explosion from March 2016, caused by the failure of the landing burn. Said by Lysander to Hermia, the line goes: “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

After showing the string of failures, the video ends on a more upbeat note with the first successful landings the company’s rockets made — on land in December 2015 and on a floating droneship in April 2016.

The many fans of SpaceX expressed admiration for the company and Musk in comments on YouTube for sharing the video showing the landing failures, something companies don’t ordinarily do. There were numerous comments that invoked Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphone that was recalled due to its exploding batteries.

For his part, Musk, who shared the video on his Twitter account as well, posted a tweet saying the cost of Falcon 9 will reduce by a factor of over 100 when SpaceX figures out how to reuse both the upper stage and fairing as well.