It was a case of two steps forward one step back for SpaceX over the last four weeks, after the company failed to successfully land the first stage of its Falcon 9 on a floating droneship last Sunday.
It was a case of two steps forward one step back for SpaceX over the last four weeks, after the company failed to successfully land the first stage of its Falcon 9 on a floating droneship last Sunday.
SpaceX made headlines in December when it managed to direct the main engines of Falcon 9 to a site at Cape Canaveral, having successfully placed a payload to low Earth orbit for Orbcomm.
The launch was undoubtedly a milestone for rocket reusability, with SpaceX founder Elon Musk saying afterwards that there was no damage found on the rocket and that it was capable of being launched again.
The 17 January launch of Jason-3 – a satellite designed to monitor the ocean – from Vandenberg, California, saw SpaceX attempt to land the first stage on an autonomous droneship floating in the Pacific.
It was the company’s third try at recovering the boosters using a ship and its third failure. Like the first two efforts, the first stage managed to hit the platform, but then exploded.
Explaining the latest failure on his Instagram account, Musk said that one of the rocket’s four landing legs did not lock into place, which caused the rocket to topple over and then explode. Musk suggested that “ice buildup due to condensation from heavy fog at liftoff” may have been the root cause.
The company’s first attempt to land on a droneship was in January 2015, when it had a hard landing. Three months later SpaceX managed to land the first stage, but then it tipped over due to “lateral velocity”, according to Musk.
SpaceX’s next scheduled mission is the launch of SES-9, which SES has said will take place sometime in February. SES-9 is set to be lofted to geostationary orbit where it will be collocated with SES-7 at 108.2E to serve fast growing pay-TV markets in Indonesia, the Philippines, South Asia and Northeast Asia.
While it will take off from Cape Canaveral – where SpaceX landed the first stage in December – a SpaceX spokesperson has been cited saying the next few missions will see the company once again attempt to land on a droneship.
Musk has previously said that acceleration is the key factor in recovering the engines, and that this differs for landing on land or sea. The boosters can take a 125 metric ton payload to orbit at a speed of 8000 km/h and then land on sea, but only 5000 km/h to land back at the launch site.
Sending the first stage back to the launch site uses up more fuel as the rocket has to do a complete U-turn, meaning it cannot reach the same acceleration levels and cannot place payloads into such high orbits.
