SpaceX deploys satellite, crashes rocket

“Unfortunately we are not standing upright on the droneship at the moment”, SpaceX lead mechanical design engineer John Federspiel said after Falcon 9 failed to land properly on Sunday.

Elon Musk has posted a video on his Instagram account of the moment SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket landed on a floating ocean barge, toppled over and exploded into pieces.

SpaceX hopes to reduce launch costs by reusing rockets rather than having them fall into the ocean. Stabilizing the rocket for reentry, SpaceX explains, “is like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm”. Following that, the first stage attempted to achieve a landing on the Just Read the Instructions barge, which was floating off the California coast.

However, the primary mission of the launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California went as planned, propelling into orbit a $180 million US-French satellite called Jason-3 to study sea level rise.

Kevin Meissner, who used to work for SpaceX, told Xinhua, “the sea landing does not require much fuel because you do not need to turn around and fly all the way back to the land”. Jason-3 is the fourth in the series, according to Discovery News.

In December, the company successfully landed its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on solid ground.

A launch is scheduled for 1:45 pm ET from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California.

In a Tweet on Sunday, Musk acknowledged the difficulty of landing a rocket on an ocean barge.

The satellite is being delivered to low-Earth orbit for multiple agencies, including NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, France’s space agency (CNES) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. It could have been worse, of course: SpaceX’s last two attempts at such ocean landings ended with the rockets exploding.

Last year, SpaceX tried twice to land on the drone ship.

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

In May 2015, SpaceX was certified by the Air Force to compete for military launches with United Launch Alliance LLC, a project created by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.