A SpaceX rocket successfully launched from a California air base on Sunday, but after putting a climate-monitoring satellite into orbit, the Falcon 9 rocket failed to stick the landing.
Advertisement
Jason-3 data will also benefit fishery management, marine industries and research into human impacts in the world’s oceans.
Jason-3 is a project of NOAA, NASA, the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.
The Jason-3 satellite, made by France and the United States, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, at 10:42 am (1842 GMT).
SpaceX repeatedly emphasized that their rocket recovery attempt was an experiment and their secondary objective.
The barge landing attempt would not be visible from shore because it will occur beyond the horizon, he said.
“Definitely harder to land on a ship”, he added.
Despite the explosive result, this is the closest the company has come to successfully landing a booster at sea.
SpaceX has botched the landing of its Falcon 9 rocket, which blew up shortly after arriving on a platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Because the payloads are so heavy, the two Falcon 9 rockets won’t have enough fuel to fly back to the coast and attempt an on-land landing. The attempt, however, ended in a fiery explosion after a broken landing leg led the rocket to topple over.
The Jason-3 satellite that launched Falcon 9, was developed under a US-European oceanography satellite mission.
The failed landing of the Falcon 9 rocket is a setback for the company, whose mission is to reduce future launch costs by reusing the multi-million dollar rockets instead of having them fall into the ocean as is now done.
The recovery location for this launch was changed from a stable pad on land to a drone ship because SpaceX was unable to receive “environmental approval” to bring their rocket back to land.
Advertisement
SpaceX has tried several times past year to land its rocket booster on a drone ship in the ocean, but all without success. Foremost among them: Spacecraft returning from lunar orbit, Mars and other deep reaches of the solar system fly at much higher speeds than those in low-earth orbit, such as NASA’s space shuttle.
