SpaceX launches ocean-monitoring satellite, but landing attempt fails

SpaceX says its Falcon 9 rocket toppled over upon landing on a floating ocean barge because one of its support legs didn’t lock as planned.

SpaceX announcers said the first stage of the Falcon 9 was not upright after reaching the 300-by-170 foot landing pad in choppy seas about 200 miles west of San Diego.

The Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered its payload – an oceanographic satellite named Jason-3 – into orbit, before attempting to land on a barge called “Just Read the Instructions” just off the Florida coast.

The primary goal of the launch was apparently achieved, as the Jason 3 weather satellite was successfully tracked in low Earth orbit, according to video feeds from space.

The flight mission features the 180-million-U.S. dollar Jason-3 satellite, a newest member in a series of Earth-observing satellites created to provide worldwide observations of global sea levels.

This was the second successful mission SpaceX has carried out since disaster struck in July.

Even though an ocean landing is more hard, SpaceX wants to flawless the technique to land rockets on drone ships.

Sharing footage of last night’s landing on Instagram, SpaceX boss Elon Musk said it might have failed due to a build-up of ice.

While giving reasons behind the fallout of Falcon 9 during landing, SpaceX owner Elon Musk said a simple mechanical failure might cause the accident, reports Wall Street Journal. Whereupon, of course, as rockets are wont to do, it exploded.

In addition, the European Union will fund operations of the Jason-3 satellite as a precursor to the future Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission and as the reference mission for Sentinel-3.

But according to the latest announcements, it appears that one of the landing legs broke upon touch down because the rocket was coming in too fast, suggesting that the touch down was unsuccessful.

Musk said that once engine 9 was sacked up again, it “showed some thrust fluctuations” that were unanticipated and engineers are now trying to figure out what is causing the issue. A third attempt last April saw the rocket land too hard to survive the impact. “Am optimistic about upcoming ship landing”.

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”.