SpaceX said before liftoff that the odds of success on this landing attempt were low, but Musk later tweeted that he felt that there was “a good chance” they would stick the landing next time. Still, the company says it will make another attempt at a historic first, landing an orbital rocket on a sea-based platform. Video from the ship was lost at the stage appeared to be approaching, and SpaceX ended its webcast coverage of the launch without providing an update on the status of the landing attempt.
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As with other recent launches, SpaceX will try yet again to fly its booster back to an automated ship in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.
SpaceX never expected to nail the landing, he said, because of the faster speed of the booster that was required to deliver the satellite to an extra-high orbit. Ground landings are much easier than ones at sea; the rocket touches down on a large expanse of immobile land, as opposed to a tiny ship floating on the ocean.
All of this work is part of the company’s effort to develop fully and rapidly reusable rockets – a key priority for SpaceX and its billionaire founder and CEO, Elon Musk.
It was the first of three SES missions that SpaceX hopes to launch from the Cape this year, if the company can begin launching more often and with fewer delays.
Unfortunately, the highly anticipated ocean landing attempt for the Falcon 9 rocket’s reusable first stage was not as successful.
“Just Read the Instructions”, a robotic platform created to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. If towing an expensive amount of high-quality telecommunications equipment weren’t enough, the rocket had to complete a particularly hard water landing. The latest try to launch the rocket was fifth of the space exploration company SpaceX.
Sunset view of SpaceX Falcon 9 after aborted launch of SES-9 communications satellite on Feb 28, 2016.
Musk has said that a 100-fold cost reduction of access to space is possible, should his rocket-recycling scheme prove as repeatable and reliable as flying an airplane. SpaceX’s next rocket launch is scheduled in a couple of weeks, where it will deliver cargo supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.
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It’s not like you can just launch rockets all willy-nilly.
