Holiday weekends are meant for relaxing things like Netflix and NFL football, right? Not at SpaceX!
SpaceX Crashed Another Rocket Onto an Ocean Barge
Space is hard.
SpaceX / Twitter
Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Sunday launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets into low-Earth orbit to deploy a satellite for some of its government partners, including NASA. The rocket launch was nothing new — SpaceX has launched plenty over the past few years and the satellite was successfully deployed. The trick on Sunday? Returning the rocket, in one piece, onto a floating barge out in the Pacific ocean.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/688577089679708160
Sounds pretty spectacular! Unfortunately, it didn’t work (although not for lack of accuracy). The rocket came down on target but had issues with one of its landing legs, according to a tweet from Musk.
Update: Here’s a video of the landing — which was incredibly close — that Musk shared to his Instagram followers.
Sunday was the third time SpaceX attempted an ocean landing. It crashed two rockets in 2015 attempting the same thing. Those crashes also resulted in some pretty surreal video footage you can watch below. SpaceX did return a rocket successfully on land to Cape Canaveral late last month.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/688799901463883776
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/688814634489413632
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/688816554306191360
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMSzC1crr0
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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