NASA’s legendary flight director Gene Kranz entitled his memoir Failure is Not an Option, referring to his days in mission control from the Mercury missions through the Apollo program. That mindset helped Kranz and teams of engineers at Johnson Space Center heroically return the crew of Apollo 13 safely home. But there is a belief among some that, since the heady Apollo days, such an attitude has made NASA’s managers too timid and too risk averse.

More than a decade ago, even before the failure of his first Falcon 1 rocket, Elon Musk had already made it clear he did not adhere to this belief. During an interview for a 2005 article in Fast Company, the founder of SpaceX gave what has become one of his most enduring quotes: "There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA,” Musk said. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

That attitude was on full display early Friday morning when a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral along the Florida coast, beneath a black sky full of stars. As the rocket thundered upward, back on Earth, a few hundred miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, a barge about the size of a football field waited to catch it. But this would be no easy grab.

SpaceX had landed once successfully at sea a month ago. But that landing attempt after flying a Dragon spacecraft to low-Earth orbit had a favorable flight profile for bringing the rocket back to land—not too great a reentry velocity and plenty of fuel to slow the rocket down. Friday morning’s launch, which ultimately delivered a Japanese communications satellite to a transfer orbit some 35,786km above the Earth, led to extreme reentry speeds and temperatures. Although Elon Musk optimistically tweeted the odds were “maybe even” of success, the company’s official prognosis was “unlikely.”

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

After separating from the second stage and its payload, the first stage of the rocket kept coasting from the initial momentum of its launch, all the way up to 200km above the Earth. There, as it flew almost parallel to the planet, small engines turned the rocket around, so its large Merlin engines at the bottom would face the ground. They had work to do. In April the first stage hit Earth’s atmosphere at 1km/s, a speed at which one could fly from Boston to New York in about six minutes.

On Friday morning, because of the greater energy needed to deliver the heavy satellite to an orbit 90 times higher than the International Space Station, the first stage hit the atmosphere at 2km/s. That means the rocket would have to shed four times as much energy as the April landing and face eight times as much heating during the turbulent reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. So when three of the rocket’s nine engines fired for about 15 seconds during reentry, success was far from assured. But then, about a minute later, an automated camera aboard the drone ship showed a flash, and when the smoke and fire had cleared there stood a rocket that had just crashed through the sonic barrier seconds before.

What made it all so remarkable is that, in front of the world, SpaceX was willing to fail. As it had many times before. The company originally tried to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at sea in January, 2015, after delivering a Dragon spacecraft to orbit. Due to a lack of hydraulic fluid to steer its grid fins, which control the direction of the stage’s lift during reentry, the first stage came in fat and blew apart on the drone ship. The moment was captured in a memorable Vine.

Rough seas prevented a barge landing the next month, and when the company tried a drone ship landing again in April, 2015, the propellant valve stuck and the rocket tipped over after coming down on the barge. Two more failures would follow in January and March of this year before the company finally stuck a sea-based landing. Each time the company had learned from previous mistakes until it finally knew enough to succeed.

Musk has said he does fear failure. Both of his most prominent companies, SpaceX and Tesla, very nearly went bankrupt in late 2008. He tasted failure with SpaceX’s first three rocket launches a decade ago. But one of the earliest SpaceX employees, Jim Cantrell, who helped Musk understand rockets even before he founded SpaceX, believes Musk really doesn’t understand failure the way most people do.

“I’m going to suggest that he is successful not because his visions are grand, not because he is extraordinarily smart, and not because he works incredibly hard,” Cantrell explained. "All of those things are true. The one major important distinction that sets him apart is his inability to consider failure. It simply is not even in his thought process. He cannot conceive of failure and that is truly remarkable.”

With his rocket company Musk has dreamed big dreams. He has unflinchingly talked about landing humans on Mars in the 2020s, which is at least a decade before NASA and its international partners, and their plans which will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, might hope to do so. To boldly go to Mars requires risks. It requires accepting failure. And so when the most likely outcome on Friday morning was that his rocket would break apart in a fiery calamity for all the world to see, that was OK. SpaceX had failed before, and it would again. Exploring the frontier of physics, engineering, and aerospace isn’t for the timid.

For Musk, then, failure is best seen as an opportunity. After the successful landing Musk crowed a bit, tweeting, "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar." If he keeps this up he might need a hangar elsewhere, too—on Mars.