Well, that’s a hat trick! For the third time this year
, SpaceX attempted to launch a Falcon 9 rocket and autonomously land the first stage portion on an unmanned barge. And for the third time this year, that (very expensive) rocket crashed and burned.
https://gizmodo.com/this-is-spacexs-rocket-crash-landing-on-a-barge-1679890015
Elon Musk gave the official, albeit disappointing, announcement on Twitter:
Ascent successful. Dragon enroute to Space Station. Rocket landed on droneship, but too hard for survival.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2015
Musk later clarified:
Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing pic.twitter.com/eJWzN6KSJa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2015
There’s a fine line between landed, crash-landed, and just plain crashed. Regardless, successfully landing a rocket on a robot ship is very difficult! In this case, it sounds like it was slightly more “crash” than “landed”. SpaceX hasn’t yet released video of the actual impact, but this is what it looked like last time.
The launch looked beautiful, though.
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