The famed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was being decommissioned after two cable failures in four months, but engineers had not figured out a way to safely demolish the telescope in a controlled manner. Well things took care of themselves on Tuesday when the telescope collapsed in an uncontrolled structural failure after additional cables snapped. The whole thing was caught on camera by a drone that was doing an inspection as well as by the observatory control room.

The iconic telescope is probably best known for showing up in movies like GoldenEye and Contact. The whole situation kind of sucks but at least nobody was hurt and we got some pretty cool footage to show for it. Unlike the time I accidentally lit my apartment on fire while making a TikTok video but turns out my phone wasn’t even recording so instead of getting any cool footage I just became homeless instead.

Keep going for the full video, as well as a video syncing the two sources up. I also included the scene from GoldenEye where they also destroy the Arecibo Observatory, but with way more explosions.

Source: Geekologie – The Arecibo Observatory collapsed on Tuesday and the whole thing was captured on video