Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Good At Vine

SpaceX isn’t afraid to admit that mistakes often go hand-in-hand with innovation. To that end, the space transport company based in Hawthorne, California posted a Vine on January 16, 2015 of an epic explosion featuring its most recently-launched rocket.

On January 10, SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the first stage of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, which was attempting to land safely back on earth after helping propel another portion of the craft to the International Space Station, had hid its landing mark, but went up in flames in the process. At that time, Musk and SpaceX hadn’t revealed any images of the crash landing. However, Musk is an individual who is well known for his transparency, so it’s little surprise when SpaceX later shared the Vine of the Falcon’s botched return to Earth with the caption, “Close, but no cigar. This time.”

SpaceX certainly knows how to get eyeballs (and plenty of them) on its incredible videos. The transport company’s earlier upload showing the first test flight of the Falcon 9 Reusable rocket model managed to garner 2.4 million views on YouTube within three days. And the SpaceX Falcon 9 crash landing Vine went viral, too, boasting a whopping 11.7 million loops as of this writing.