Footage captures a Chinese rocket booster almost wiping out a rural village

• Rocket launches don't always go to plan.
• This particular launch did go to plan, but when the booster from the Long March 3B fell back down to earth, it narrowly avoided a rural village.
• Footage captures the booster plummeting to a nearby hillside and exploding quite spectacularly.

As Elon Musk knows all too well, it's not unusual for rocket launches to fail.

And SpaceX has a library of those failures, even celebrating them in a greatest hits compilation not too long ago as an example of how success comes for those who can learn from their mistakes.

But you very rarely get to catch one live, tumbling down near your town:

Technically, the Long March 3B launch wasn't a failure. What you're seeing above is the booster after it kicked away from the rocket about 700km from its launch pad at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

But it is very likely the booster wasn't meant to threaten civilian lives. It's why most launches are held over the sea or over areas where humans generally don't build houses.

And if a booster for some reason is expected to crash down where people can see it crash down, alerts – which are admittedly in a bit of a bad place right now – are usually sent out.

Engadget reports that this incident – and another in 1996 where a proper rocket actually hit the town of Xichang, killing at least six– could be seen as a problem China has been dealing with since the Cold War.

Secrecy concerns meant China set up launch pads as far away from international and sea borders as possible, and statistics say that usually puts a small town or village somewhere in danger. China is still in the process of building better, safer launch pads for the modern age.

You can read more about that here.

Here's the booster after it hit Earth:

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