The first of four failed barge landings, this one from January 2015.
SpaceX
The saying is that "space is hard," and it seems that's especially true when you end a trip to space by landing the rocket that carried you there gently standing straight up on a robotic drone barge at sea. But hard has never deterred commercial space flight company SpaceX, which attempted the historic landing off the coast of Florida for the fourth time on Friday.
And for the fourth time, it failed to land soft enough and stay standing up to fly another day.
Before the landing attempt, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered SES-9, a commercial communications satellite into orbit before heading back to the drone barge named "Of Course I Still Love You" some 600 kilometers off the coast of Florida.
As the glowing thrusters of the rocket came into the frame of a live video feed from the platform Friday evening, the force of the rocket's landing caused the video feed to cut out.
About an hour later came confirmation via Twitter that it had been hard (and therefore unsuccessful) landing attempt.
As long as humans have been using booster rockets to send satellites and other craft in to space, they've typically ended up on the bottom of the ocean somewhere after just a single use. A handful of companies, including SpaceX, are looking to compete by developing re-usable rockets to drive down the cost of getting to space.
In December, SpaceX successfully landed one of its Falcon 9 rockets on land for the first time at Cape Canaveral after a successful satellite deployment mission, but some missions require the recovery of the rocket to be done at sea.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin actually beat SpaceX to the punch in November, successfully landing its New Shepherd rocket after being launched to the edge of space and retuing, although its mission seems to have been mostly for marketing purposes and less difficult than what Musk's company is attempting.
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