SpaceX Rocket Landing on Ocean Platform Fails

A key ocean-monitoring satellite on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Sunday that will continue a almost quarter-century record of tracking global sea level rise.

Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blasted off Sunday morning from a US airbase in southern California, with a satellite created to measure how global warming and sea level rise impacts coastal wind speeds and currents.

In his Instagram description, Musk said what caused the leg to lock might have been from “ice buildup due to condensation from heavy fog at liftoff”. It did not succeed, however, in its long-sought goal of bringing the Falcon 9 launch vehicle back to Earth for an upright sea landing. Although the company did not provide any details regarding the unsuccessful attempt, it said on a webcast that the ocean waves were choppy.

Elon Musk is hoping to revolutionize the space industry by creating cheap, reusable rockets. This was the third time SpaceX attempted to land one of its rockets on a drone ship, and each time the company keeps getting one step closer.

“Jason-3 will take the pulse of our changing planet by gathering environmental intelligence from the world’s oceans”, said Stephen Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service.

The rocket company had managed a historic first controlled return of an orbital stage last month.

The carrier rocket had lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Los Angeles, in a foggy and cloudy weather at 10:42 am local time (1842 GMT).

Jason-3 is the result of an worldwide partnership between EUMETSAT, the French Space Agency (CNES), the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the European Union, which funds European contributions to Jason-3 operations as part of its Copernicus Programme. After being used to help calibrate the new satellite, Jason-2 will be moved to an orbit to study the shape of the sea floor. The rocket landed a mere 1.3 meters from the center of the platform on the vessel.

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.