So said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after his Falcon 9 rocket crashed and burned in the company’s third attempt at landing it on a giant barge floating in the sea.
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Twice before Sunday, SpaceX had tried and not succeeded in landing its Falcon 9 boosters onto a drone ship.
“Falcon lands on droneship, but the lockout collet doesn’t latch on one the four legs, causing it to tip over post landing”, he wrote on Instagram.
SpaceX had a good day today: their launch’s primary mission, deliver the Jason 3 Satellite was successful.
“Touchdown speed was ok but a leg lockout didn’t latch, so it tipped over after landing”, Musk tweeted.
SpaceX is trying to land its rockets back on Earth in order to re-use the parts in the future and make spaceflight cheaper and more sustainable. Even though SpaceX landed one of their rockets last month, they did so on solid ground. This was the fourth time a rocket failed to complete the landing process at sea.
“SpaceX is continuing to attempt ocean landings as it will give the company better flexibility in recovering higher launch velocity rockets”.
“Similar to an aircraft carrier vs land: much smaller target area, that’s also translating and rotating”.
In a Tweet on Sunday, Musk acknowledged the difficulty of landing a rocket on an ocean barge. The data from Jason 3 will be used to monitor global sea level rise, research human impacts on oceans and aid the prediction of hurricane intensity over the seas. 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.
The worldwide mission is led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with Nasa, French space agency CNES, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.
The Falcon 9 first stage will be guided to a soft landing on the barge named “Just Read The Instructions”, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX vice president for mission assurance during a pre-launch media briefing on January 15.
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Meanwhile in space, the Jason 3 satellite made it into orbit, and it’s coasting for a short while before its second stage restarts.
