Elon Musk’s vision of colonising Mars has reignited the enthusiasm around space travel. And through his company SpaceX, rocket launches have become the staple of many online viewers diet. But with this vision, their are many hiccups on the way. And while SpaceX recently landed a reusable booster on land last night the company failed to land on a platform at sea. The drone ship broke on leg on landing, causing the structure to fall over. Musk’s team has experienced hiccups before, and it surely won’t be long before they master the art of barge-landing. Musk’s optimistic about the next attempt at landing on a ship, tweeting shortly after the accident “At least the pieces were bigger this time.” It’s a fascinating story that’s brought space adventure back into everyday life and is an attempt to make it more affordable. – Stuart Lowman
By Dana Hull
(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk’s SpaceX said its Falcon 9 booster had a “hard landing” and broke a landing leg on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean minutes after lofting a satellite into orbit.
“Touchdown speed was OK, but a leg lockout didn’t latch, so it tipped over after landing,” Musk said in a tweet Sunday.
The damage left Space Exploration Technologies Corp. short of a clearly successful touchdown on a drone ship. The ability to land a reusable booster at sea or on land, which it’s already accomplished, would give SpaceX more options for staging low-cost space flights — toward Musk’s eventual goal of missions to Mars. Two previous attempts at a sea landing failed, while another had to be called off because of rough seas.
“Definitely harder to land on a ship,” Musk tweeted. “Much smaller target area.”
SpaceX later tweeted that the booster “landed softly” within 1.3 meters (8.3 feet) of the ship’s center.
The two-stage rocket lifted off in a fog from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at about 10:42 a.m. local time. The payload was the Jason-3 satellite, a project led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and two European partners. Jason-3 will track sea-level change for purposes such as improved hurricane forecasting.
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Booster rockets have typically been left to tumble back to Earth after launch, leaving them broken up by the intense heat of re-entering the atmosphere. Landing them upright may help winnow the cost of access to space by a hundredfold, Musk has estimated, because the bulk of launch costs comes from building a rocket that flies only once.
Recycling engines and the Falcon 9’s 14-story, aluminium- lithium alloy first stage also may enableSpaceX, already the cheapest launch provider in its category, to further undercut U.S. and European rivals.
Primary Mission
SpaceX’s primary mission Sunday was to send the Jason-3 satellite into orbit.
“After a successful SpaceX Falcon 9 launch and ascent including two burns by the rocket’s second stage engine, the Jason-3 spacecraft has separated and is flying free,” said Michael Curie of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in an e-mail.
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But SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, had the secondary goal of sticking the landing on the drone ship. Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive officer, was at Base Sunday.
SpaceX first tested the ability of the Falcon 9 to touch down its landing legs on a barge a year ago. In that attempt, the 14-story rocket ran out of hydraulic fluid shortly before it hit the ship and broke into pieces. Another test scheduled for February 2015 was called off because of oceanic conditions. A third attempt last April saw the rocket land too hard to survive the impact.
“At least the pieces were bigger this time,” tweeted Musk, who said he was optimistic about the next attempt at landing on a ship.
Florida Landing
SpaceX made history last month by landing one of its Falcon 9 rocket stages on land at Cape Canaveral, Florida. But SpaceX has wanted to perfect the landing-at-sea technique, despite the immense technical challenges of trying to slow a rocket traveling roughly 5,000 miles per hour (8,045 kilometers per hour) and land it on a platform bobbing in the Pacific Ocean. Foremost among them: Spacecraft returning from lunar orbit, Mars, and other deep reaches of the solar system fly at much higher speeds than those in low-earth orbit, such as NASA’s space shuttle.
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.
The 44-year-old billionaire founded SpaceX in 2002 with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on Mars. In May, SpaceX was certified by the Air Force to compete for military launches with United Launch Alliance LLC, a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. Last week, SpaceX was among three winners in another round of contracts to haul cargo to the International Space Station.
