The rocket landings have become a regular fixture on SpaceX launches as the California-based company tries to flawless techniques to make the Falcon 9 first stage reusable, a goal SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk says is vital to reducing the cost of spaceflight.
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“After a successful SpaceX Falcon 9 launch and ascent including two burns by the rocket’s second stage engine, the Jason-3 spacecraft has separated and is flying free”, said Michael Curie of NASA in an email.
Posting a video on Instagram, Musk showed us a new view of the rocket successfully landing on its platform and then slowly falling over on its side and exploding into flames. From low-Earth orbit, Jason-3 will precisely measure the height of 95 percent of the world’s ice-free ocean every 10 days.
Jason-3 is an global mission led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in partnership with NASA, the French space agency CNES, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.
SpaceX was successful in December in landing its rocket upright on land, and it admits sea landings are more hard.
It said the bid to nail the experimental landing of the first stage on the SpaceX drone ship “Just Read the Instructions”, had been a “secondary test objective”.
The failed landing was a setback for the Hawthorne company’s plan to reduce launch costs by reusing rockets rather than having them fall into the ocean.
Therefore, we can likely expect to see more rocket landing attempts like this in the future.
Hans Koenigsmann, president of mission assurance at SpaceX, said this time the company made a decision to land the rocket on the ocean because they do not have the “environmental approval” to attempt a landing on solid ground in the area. “Jason-3 satellite has been deployed”. About 10 minutes after lift off the first stage of its two-stage rocket headed back toward Earth for an attempt at landing on an un-crewed, autonomous drone ship floating 186 miles south of the California launch site, in the Pacific.
NOAA, in collaboration with the European partners, is responsible for the Jason-3 mission. After being used to help calibrate the new satellite, Jason-2 will be moved to an orbit to study the shape of the sea floor.
SpaceX said the rocket landed within 1.3m of the droneship’s centre.
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In April 2015, the Falcon 9 crashed in another attemped drone ship landing due to “slower than expected throttle valve response”, according to Musk.
