Last night, rocket firm SpaceX just missed out on successfully landing the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on an ocean barge.
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Landing at sea offers a greater margin of safety for high-speed rockets travelling deeper into space, when the chance of missing the landing pad is greater.
The first stage of the rocket made it back to the platform, which was floating in the Pacific Ocean, but one of the rocket’s landing legs failed to latch into position, SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk wrote on Twitter.
The company, which initially said it thought the rocket experienced a “hard landing”, explained that one of the legs failed to latch on the landing platform.
Sunday’s launch was the fourth attempt by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to safely land a rocket at sea.
“Definitely harder to land on a ship”.
In April 2015, the Falcon 9 crashed in another attemped drone ship landing due to “slower than expected throttle valve response”, according to Musk. Jason-3, an worldwide mission with NASA participation, will continue a 23-year record of monitoring global sea level rise. The attempt, however, ended in a fiery explosion after a broken landing leg led the rocket to topple over.
Yesterday’s landing attempt by the Falcon 9 rocket was nearly successful, the rocket actually landed on the droneship, unfortunately it fell over and then exploded, this can be seen in the video below. The rockets which cost between $60 million to $90 million are generally discarded after launch.
NOAA, in collaboration with the European partners, is responsible for the Jason-3 mission.
Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance for SpaceX, said previously that the current rocket would have been able to return to land, but the company does not have environmental approval at Vandenberg yet. It will measure the topography of the ocean surface for a four-agency global partnership consisting of NOAA, NASA, Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), France’s space agency, and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat).
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During a five-year mission, its data will also be used to aid fisheries management and research into human impacts on the world’s oceans.
