A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the U.S.-European Jason-3 satellite launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 4 East on Sunday, Jan. 17, 2016.
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The first stage of a SpaceX rocket that delivered an ocean-monitoring satellite into orbit made a hard landing on an ocean barge and broke a support leg.
Competitor Blue Origin, headed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, succeeded in landing a suborbital rocket in November. 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.
“As we touched down, it was a slightly harder landing than we expected, and it looks like one of the landing legs may have broken as we touched down on the drone ship”, said John Federspiel, SpaceX’s lead mechanical design engineer.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched a climate-monitoring satellite into orbit, but the attempt to land the rocket failed.
Like its predecessors, Jason-3 is equipped with radar altimeter to bounce microwave energy off the ocean and a GPS system to identify the satellite’s precise location.
The first attempted boat landing was nearly exactly a year ago, and ended with the rocket stage striking the barge at an angle and exploding.
SpaceX said the rocket landed within 1.3 meters (yards) of the droneship’s center.
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.
It was the third time the company failed to accomplish a clean sea landing, although the company brought a Falcon rocket stage back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., on December 21.
But SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., had the secondary goal of sticking the landing on the drone ship. The rocket tipped over and exploded shortly after reaching the ship. “Just not physically possible to return to launch site”, tweeted Musk. Still, SpaceX said, it wants to have the options for both at-sea and on-land landings.
“At least the pieces were bigger this time”, Musk said on Twitter.
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In May 2015, SpaceX was certified by the Air Force to compete for military launches with United Launch Alliance LLC, a project created by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
