SpaceX Jason-3 Launch From California

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the U.S.-European Jason-3 satellite launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 4 East on Sunday, Jan. 17, 2016.

The company did have a breakthrough late a year ago when it successfully managed to land a first-stage booster back to the ground at Cape Canaveral in December.

“Falcon lands on droneship, but the lockout collet doesn’t latch on one the four legs, causing it to tip over post landing”, he wrote on Instagram.

The company is developing soft landings at sea which will allow them to re-use the rockets in future launches, in hopes of making the process more affordable and efficient. This launch of NASA satellite is not the first satellite to study the world’s oceans in a changing climate instead many satellites have been launched in the past but those have been limited to about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the coast.

This was SpaceX’s third attempt at landing the Falcon rocket on a mobile barge.

SpaceX said Jason-3 was the newest satellite in a series created to maintain long-term satellite altimetry observations of global sea surface height. After the botched landing, Mr. Musk, SpaceX’s founder, chief executive and top designer, sent a Tweet stressing that it is “definitely harder to land on a ship”, which he compared to the difference between aiming for “an aircraft carrier vs. land…”

Alan Boyle at GeekWire – who covered the launch and landing thoroughly – said that yesterday’s sea landing was also because SpaceX wasn’t able to obtain regulatory approval for an on-land touchdown in California.

A rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Sunday and successfully delivered an ocean-monitoring satellite into space, but it failed to stick the landing. Initial announcements suggested that the autonomous drone ship experienced hard landing.

Yesterday’s explosion was not due to high speed or a turbulent ocean but came down to a leg on the rocket that did not lock out as anticipated.

This undated artist rendering provided by NASA shows the Jason-3 satellite.

“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.