SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon first stage on the ground at Cape Canaveral back in December. but ocean landings are proving to be more hard.
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The two-stage rocket lifted off in a fog from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at about 10:42 a.m. local time. Landing them upright may help winnow the cost of access to space by a hundredfold, Musk has estimated, because the bulk of launch costs comes from building a rocket that flies only once.
Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blasted off Sunday morning from a US airbase in southern California, with a satellite created to measure how global warming and sea level rise impacts coastal wind speeds and currents. The announcement was made in a statement by a SpaceX spokesperson, who said, “It looks like we came in on target as we planned, but slightly harder landing [than desired]”.
The company has already got a major milestone under its belt, it has been able to land a reusable rocket after its mission in space on solid ground, and that rocket has even been fired up to show that it’s completely reusable.
Despite the landing mishap, the satellite was successfully delivered to its polar orbit. “Won’t be last [Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly], but am optimistic about upcoming ship landing”.
Expensive rocket components are mostly discarded into the ocean after launch, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
In addition, the European Union will fund operations of the Jason-3 satellite as a precursor to the future Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission and as the reference mission for Sentinel-3.
SpaceX third attempt at landing Falcon 9 on a landing pad floating the sea was still unsuccessful due to a rocket leg that did not latch.
In a Tweet on Sunday, Musk acknowledged the difficulty of landing a rocket on an ocean barge.
Falcon lands on droneship, but the lockout collet doesn’t latch on one the four legs, causing it…
The 1,200-pound spacecraft is the fourth in a series of ocean-monitoring satellites taking center stage in monitoring Earth’s climate.
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Last year, SpaceX attempted this same landing twice, and did not succeed in retrieving the rocket.
