SpaceX bungles Falcon 9 rocket ocean landing

On Sunday, the Falcon 9 delivered a satellite into orbit and it came super close to sticking the landing on water.

According to The Associated Press, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted a video of the landing attempt to his Instagram account.

Musk stated on social media a leg lockout did not latch, so the rocket tipped over after landing.

A SpaceX rocket successfully launched from a California air base on Sunday, but after putting a climate-monitoring satellite into orbit, the Falcon 9 rocket failed to stick the landing.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is seen as it launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 4 East with the Jason-3 spacecraft onboard, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2016, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

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. “Was within 1.3 meters of droneship center”.

The rocket had already completed the main part of its mission in getting the Jason-3 ocean-measuring satellite into orbit.

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.

“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.

Using the term RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly), Mr Musk said it won’t be the last time a rocket blows up.

SpaceX had tried once before to land a rocket on a platform in the ocean but that failed pretty spectacularly.

“Definitely harder to land on a ship”, he added after the latest foible.

The idea to land the rocket on a platform in the ocean is based on a future perspective to reuse rockets carrying out more demanding tasks when there’s not enough fuel left to reach land.

“SpaceX is continuing to attempt ocean landings as it will give the company better flexibility in recovering higher launch velocity rockets”. One such SpaceX rocket loaded with supplies exploded on an East coast launch pad in 2015.