The company has made a lot of progress since then, having successfully launching then guiding a rocket back to Earth on December 21, ushering in a new era of reusable rockets.
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The rocket will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying a NASA’s Jason-3 satellite that will be deployed to monitor weather patterns on the ocean’s surface, NBC reports.
But if you’ve been following SpaceX’s reusable rocket saga, you’ll know this is hardly the first time the company has flirted with ocean platforms.
Well, maybe it’s not completely different: The attempt, scheduled for January 17, follows up on last month’s spectacularly successful first-stage landing in Cape Canaveral, Fla. So even if SpaceX wanted to bring its rocket back to land, they may not have been able to get it approved. In December, the company announced that it’d be attempting a rocket landing once more, this time, on solid ground.
Also a mobile landing site must be placed in a region where it is safest or most fuel-efficient for the rocket to come down. They occurred in Cape Canaveral. It is much more complicated than landing the selfsame rocket on a launch pad which is situated on land.
For now, SpaceX is concentrating on reusing just the first stage of its Falcon rockets, which sell for about $61 million, the company’s website shows.
This will not be the exact same rocket the company launched last month – though SpaceX founder Elon Musk is confident that would be just fine.
It seems that it would make more sense for SpaceX to use its next few launches to continue to ideal the less hard, but still incredibly complex, strategy of ground-based rocket landing. We’ll have an answer very soon.
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A previous attempt in January 2015 to land a Falcon 9 on a “drone ship” – an automated seagoing landing platform – almost succeeded, but a last-minute failure saw the rocket topple over and explode in spectacular fashion.
