Watch SpaceX Almost Succeed in Landing a Falcon 9 on Ship

Elon Musk’s company first tested the ability of the Falcon 9 to land on a barge a year ago, but the 14-story rocket ran out of hydraulic fluid before it hit the ship and broke into pieces.

SpaceX attempted to land a rocket upright on a platform on Sunday but failed.

While giving reasons behind the fallout of Falcon 9 during landing, SpaceX owner Elon Musk said a simple mechanical failure might cause the accident, reports Wall Street Journal.

The rocket successfully launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 10:42 AM local time, carrying the Jason-3 oceanography satellite, a joint mission between United States and European space and meteorological agencies.

“Similar to an aircraft carrier vs land: much smaller target area, that’s also translating and rotating”.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket approaches floating drone ship, seconds before tipping over in a spectacular crash. Musk has said he hopes to make a sea landing on the robotic barge work because it would save fuel – ships can move – and it would remove landings away from where people work and live. “Jason-3 satellite has been deployed”.

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.

Although the rocket successfully touched down on the craft, one of its landing legs failed to latch into position which caused it to tip over.

Last month a SpaceX rocket landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla. was successful.

During a five-year mission, its data will also be used to aid fisheries management and research into human impacts on the world s oceans. It appears the landing would have been successful had the part not malfunctioned, as the rocket landed within a few yards of the droneship’s center.

Currently, expensive rocket components are jettisoned into the ocean after launch, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars.

Still, SpaceX said, it wants to have the options for both at-sea and on-land landings.

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.