For the last several months many of you have been following the ongoing saga of SpaceX and the development of their new Starship rocket and the previous launches of SN8 and SN9.  SN8 was a near miss, as one of the rockets failed on landing and caused it to crash and SN9 was a bit more spectacular of a failure as it flipped over and crashed after a catastrophic engine failure.

Today’s launch of SN10 brought a lot of speculation of whether or not this was the time that SpaceX was going to get the landing they wanted.  The launch took place at approximately 6:15 PM Eastern time and sent the rocket to about 10 km in the air before beginning the “belly-flop” descent back to Earth.  Shortly before the rocket reaches the surface, the tail end of the rocket swings downward and the engines fire to assist in slowing it for a landing.  SN10 successfully landed at about 6 minutes and 30 seconds after launch.

Several minutes later, the rocket exploded on the pad, however, it didn’t overshadow the successful landing of the rocket, something that seemed impossible a decade ago.

Watch:

JUST IN: SN10 explodes shortly after landing pic.twitter.com/hr0i8GXlJF

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 3, 2021

Congrats to Elon Musk and the whole SpaceX team on a job well done!