SpaceX Narrowly Misses Rocket Landing After Dragon Spaceship Launch Success

SpaceX Narrowly Misses Rocket Landing After Dragon Spaceship Launch Success


A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the company’s Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station today, then turned around and nearly pulled off a soft landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

The unmanned Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:10 p.m. EDT (2010 GMT) today (April 14), sending Dragon to orbit on a resupply mission for NASA. SpaceX then attempted to bring the rocket’s first stage back down for a vertical landing on an “autonomous spaceport drone ship,” in a highly anticipated reusable-rocket test.

The unprecedented maneuver almost worked — but not quite.

“Ascent successful. Dragon enroute to Space Station. Rocket landed on droneship, but too hard for survival,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter today. “Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing,” he added in another tweet.

Today’s launch was originally scheduled for Monday (April 13) but was delayed a day by bad weather.

Developing fully and rapidly reusable rockets is a key priority for SpaceX and Musk, who has said that such technology could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100.

SpaceX has now attempted the rocket landing twice. The previous try occurred on Jan. 10, during the last Dragon launch; the Falcon 9 first stage came down on target that day as well, but it hit the drone ship too hard and exploded on the deck.

Musk said in the aftermath of the Jan. 10 attempt that the rocket stage’s stabilizing “grid fins” ran out of hydraulic fluid. SpaceX addressed that issue and also upgraded the drone ship — which is called “Just Read the Instructions,” after a sentient colony ship in the novels of sci-fi author Iain M. Banks — to be more stable in rough seas, company representatives have said.

Musk is probably not particularly surprised or disappointed by today’s near-miss. On Monday, he tweeted that the chances of landing success were less than 50 percent.

While the reusable-rocket test has been grabbing most of the headlines, the main goal of today’s launch was to get Dragon aloft. SpaceX holds a $1.6 billion NASA contract to fly at least 12 resupply missions to the orbiting lab using Dragon and the Falcon 9; today’s launch kicked off the sixth of those cargo missions.