Even though an ocean landing is more hard, SpaceX wants to flawless the technique to land rockets on drone ships. “Touchdown speed was ok, but a leg lockout didn’t latch, so it tipped over after landing”.
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After sending Jason-3 satellite on its way to orbit, the rocket’s first stage separated and turned around in an attempt to touch down on a platform floating in the Pacific Ocean, said officials with privately held SpaceX, also known as Space Exploration Technologies.
In December, the company successfully landed its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on solid ground.
Sunday’s effort was far more hard, and flight announcers minimized expectations from the start, pointing out the engineering difficulties of the “experimental” attempt to land on a drone ship named Just Read the Instructions, about 200 miles off Southern California. He said the “root cause may have been ice buildup due to condensation from heavy fog at liftoff”.
Musk said the Falcon 9 rocket successfully completed its mission and deployed the Jason-3 satellite to low-Earth orbit.
The botched landing marked the California-based company’s fourth such failed attempt to save carrier rockets, disrupting its plan to reduce launch costs by recycling them instead of letting them fall into the ocean.
SpaceX said the rocket landed within 1.3 meters (yards) of the droneship’s center. SpaceX’s next launch is another satellite, this time for communications firm SES, scheduled to blast off in February. It will deliver long-term observations of global sea surface height, providing ocean data critical to predicting hurricanes and severe weather before landfall. But he adds the ship landings are necessary for “high velocity missions”.
After a historical, successful landing at Cape Canaveral last month, SpaceX wanted to flawless the landing-at-sea technique, but unfortunately, all tests ended in failure.
SpaceX’s landing attempt on Sunday was the third time the privately owned firm had tried to recover a rocket on an ocean platform.
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SpaceX was unable to land its Falcon 9 rocket after putting a climate-monitoring satellite into orbit, failing in its bid to recycle rockets. NOAA is partnering with NASA, the French Space Agency CNES, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
