SpaceX attempting rocket water landing

Sunday’s launch was the fourth attempt by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to safely land a rocket at sea.

SpaceX is trying to land a rocket booster on what it calls an “autonomous spaceport drone ship”, essentially a floating platform at sea.

The private space company had launched a NASA satellite into space from California on Sunday but when Space X attempted to land the rocket on a purpose-built barge in the Pacific Ocean, disaster struck.

The Falcon 9 blasted off earlier in the day from Vandenberg Air Force Base to put the U.S- and European-owned Jason 3 climate-monitoring satellite into orbit.

Viewers were watching live footage of the drone ship minutes before the scheduled landing when the video cut out.

The goal of the mission was to launch the Jason-3 satellite into an orbit inclined 66 grades relative to the equator, at a distance of 830-mile from the Earth’s ground. The rocket landed a mere 1.3 meters from the center of the platform on the vessel.

Musk tweeted that this landing attempt was inherently more hard than the previous successful attempt on land at Cape Canaveral.

SpaceX will attempt barge landings with its next two Falcon 9 launches: the SES-9 comms satellite, which needs to go into geostationary orbit in February, and then an ISS resupply mission in March.

The failed landing of the Falcon 9 rocket is a setback for the company, whose mission is to reduce future launch costs by reusing the multi-million dollar rockets instead of having them fall into the ocean as is now done. Both times the first stage exploded after reaching the platform.

SpaceX has tried landing rockets upright on a barge before but those attempts failed when the rockets tipped into the ocean.

The worldwide mission Jason-3, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) partnering with the US space agency NASA, CNES (the French Space Agency) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, will continue to monitor and precisely measure global sea surface heights, observe the intensification of tropical cyclones and support seasonal and coastal forecasts.

The satellite would also help scientists understand the effects of climate change on ocean levels.