SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket Didn’t Quite Stick Its Barge Landing

In a tweet, the company said, “First stage on target at drone ship but looks like hard landing; broke landing leg”. But this time, it would try to land on what Musk calls an “autonomous spaceport drone ship”, a platform off the California coast. It has a purpose-built unmanned “drone ship” built for the objective (named “Just Read the Instructions” in honour of the science fiction author Iain M Banks) and the rockets are armed with small thrusters to control their descent.

Despite the vast technical challenges of trying to slow a rocket traveling at 5,000 miles per hour and land it on a platform in the Pacific Ocean, if SpaceX manages to accomplish this goal, it would give the company more options for staging low-priced space flights.

SpaceX has tried landing rockets upright on a barge before but those attempts failed when the rockets tipped into the ocean.

The history-making landing was a major cost-saving step forward for space operations, proving that highly expensive rockets can be recovered and reused instead of merely being lost into the ocean.

With an aim to detect and measure ocean phenomena like El Nino, NASA has scheduled to launch the latest in the series of U.S.-European satellites on Sunday at 10:42 a.m. PST from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a backup opportunity on Monday.

So what did Bezos do when SpaceX came close to pulling off the first landing of a used rocket booster on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean?

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

SpaceX did not immediately supply any firm information on the landing, but one controller said on the company’s video feed that the landing of the booster was secondary to the successful launch of the weather satellite.

Jason-3 will secure the continuity of the unique climate data record of the mean sea level initiated by Topex-Poseidon in 1992 and continued by Jason-1 and Jason-2. The rocket did not respond to commands to reduce the thrust, leading to another failed attempt.

SpaceX said no images of the final leg of the trip were available because the live video link was disrupted before the rocket landed, the Nine Network reported.

Mr. Musk, in a response to a tweet, said Sunday’s landing “probably” would have had the same result if it had been a touchdown on land.