Close, but no cigar. Though you'd expect from the fire and the smoke to find something at the scene of the Falcon 9 rocket's landing site. After multiple delays and promising weather conditions this Tuesday April 14, an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket developed by SpaceX was launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in transit towards the International Space Station, full of supplies. But in the second attempt that the company has pursued in trying to recapture the rocket's first stage by landing it on an autonomous drone ship, SpaceX encountered yet another failure even after making monumental changes since the Jan. 10 crash landing, earlier this year.
Nine minutes after the Falcon 9 launched at 4:10pm EDT, sending the Dragon cargo capsule into orbit on a resupply mission for NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station, private sector space company SpaceX attempted yet again to recapture the first stage of their mission on a barge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, only this time they hoped a vertical landing may stick better than the first, which ended in disaster.
In its last attempt, SpaceX had some fatal errors that led to a crash landing of epic proportions. Initial weather conditions continued to delay the launch, and when the rocket was on its return the fourteen-story obelisk of SpaceX's Falcon 9 smashed into the platform bursting into flames, which founder Elon Musk would later reveal was because it ran out of hydraulic fluid on its return flight home. This time they have made some changes.
"Since our last landing attempt, the drone ship has been upgraded to tolerate more powerful ocean swells, however, weather at the landing site is looking significantly better this time" spokespersons for SpaceX say. "After Dragon and Falcon 9's second stage are on their way to orbit, the first stage will execute a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere, targeting touchdown on an autonomous spaceport drone ship approximately nine minutes after launch."
Spokespersons for the company were hopeful that the second attempt would prove successful, boasting a 75 to 80 percent chance that they would stick a successful landing if everything went according to plan, but as is the nature of the space race nothing ever quite goes according to plan.
Moments into the mission SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon Musk Tweeted, saying "Ascent successful. Dragon enroute to Space Station. Rocket landed on drone ship,but too hard for survival."
"Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess later velocity caused it to tip over post landing."
So even though everything looked according to plans, the second attempt can be marked as a failure in the score books, but that can't come as too big of a surprise to the company. In fact, in the process of trial and error it's like playing a numbers game until SpaceX learns a successful way to raise their odds. Though the company may have overestimated their probability of success, it comes as no surprise to Musk who on Monday after several delays revealed that the chances of successfully landing were less than 50 percent-and some experts say that is even a generous estimation by their calculations.
