SpaceX fails to land Falcon 9 at sea again

This had failed twice before and it failed again Sunday, but it nearly worked.

But, SpaceX, the company led by internet and business magnate Elon Musk, said after the landing on Monday morning (AEST) that it was disappointed because it wanted to reuse the parts to enable more sustainable and cheaper spaceflights in the future.

“Touchdown speed was OK, but a leg lockout didn’t latch, so it tipped over after landing”, SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk wrote on Twitter.

The Falcon 9 is 14 stories tall and must go from traveling at almost 1,300 meters per second-or just under 1 mile per second-to just two meters per second before it lands.

Despite its near vertical descent however, a hardware failure with the landing legs meant that it could not maintain its position and shortly after toppled over.

“Jason allows us to get the big picture in terms of sea-level change in the years to come”, said Laury Miller, Jason-3 program scientist.

“The measurements from Jason-3 will advance our efforts to understand Earth as an integrated system by increasing our knowledge of sea level changes and the ocean’s roles in climate”, added John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for science at the NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. In a tweet, the company said, “First stage on target at drone ship but looks like hard landing; broke landing leg”.

Meanwhile in space, the Jason 3 satellite made it into orbit, and it’s coasting for a short while before its second stage restarts.

It was the third time the company failed to accomplish a clean sea landing, although the company brought a Falcon rocket stage back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., on December 21.

SpaceX is still waiting for the approval of the environmental agency in order to recover and bring back its rocket to its launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Even though an ocean landing is more hard, SpaceX wants to flawless the technique because ship landings “are needed for high velocity missions”, Musk tweeted.

Last year, SpaceX attempted this same landing twice, and did not succeed in retrieving the rocket.

Though private aerospace company SpaceX successfully launched an ocean-monitoring satellite from California into Earth’s orbit on Sunday, the rocket that carried it exploded into pieces after it landed on a floating barge in choppy seas about 200 miles west of San Diego. The Falcon 9 shattered on the deck of the landing pad of the drone ship.