The Falcon 9 rocket sliced a dazzling arc through the early morning Florida sky on Friday. (credit: SpaceX)

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.