SpaceX Falcon delivers NASA/NOAA satellite but has rough landing

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, tweeted that while the touchdown speed of the rocket was okay, there was an issue with one of the landing legs which caused the rocket to tip over after landing.

SpaceX has failed again in its attempt to execute a successful ocean landing of the company’s flagship rocket on a drone platform in the Pacific Ocean.

Jason-3 is a project of NOAA, NASA, the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.

A Falcon 9 rocket was successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s Central Coast on January 17, 2016.

“More than 90 percent of all the heat being trapped in the Earth’s system … is actually going into the ocean”, said Laury Miller, Jason-3 lead scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Jason-3 satellite has been deployed”. Meteorologists predicted swells of 10- to 13-feet where the barge waited for the landing attempt.

“Definitely harder to land on a ship”, Musk tweeted.

Twice before Sunday, SpaceX had tried and not succeeded in landing its Falcon 9 boosters onto a drone ship.

Another company official said the botched landing was secondary to the successful launch of the weather satellite.

Once it powers the rocket into space, the booster stage of the Falcon 9 rocket would separate, turn around and head back toward Earth, just as it did last month.

SpaceX first tested the ability of the Falcon 9 to touch down its landing legs on a barge a year ago.

Although the launch and satellite deployment came off without a hitch, this was SpaceX’s third failed landing of the rocket stage at sea.

Space X’s troubled rocket program has suffered another setback after a rocket exploded spectacularly upon landing after successfully sending a satellite into orbit.

Landing on the ground saves the time, trouble and expense of dispatching a floating landing platform and support ships, but not all of SpaceX’s rockets will have the spare fuel to make it back to the launch site. The latest launch was SpaceX’s fourth attempt to land a rocket at sea.