Historic SpaceX Rocket Landing: What Will Be Different This Weekend

Just minutes after takeoff, the rocket’s main booster will fall back to earth, where SpaceX will attempt to land it on a drone barge located roughly 200 miles off the coast in the Pacific Ocean.

Sunday’s launch and landing of a fresh rocket – SpaceX is saving the December 21 stage for posterity – nonetheless would help burnish Musk’s corporate image with a second consecutive milestone, after a spectacular explosion of a Falcon 9 last June, said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for Teal Group Corp., a defense and aerospace analysis company based in Fairfax, Va.

As the video (seen here) revealed, the Hawthorne, Calif-based company’s employees were looking on during launch preparations. It was the first time an unmanned rocket returned to land vertically at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and represented a tremendous success for SpaceX.

“The sea state is good for surfing, and a little bit high for landing, but we don’t anticipate that that’s going to be a major problem”, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of mission assurance, said during a prelaunch press conference Friday (Jan. 15).

United Launch Alliance last week lifted the Centaur upper stage on top of the Atlas V booster slated to launch the first mission of the year from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

“The Falcon 9 rocket and the Jason-3 spacecraft are ready”, he said. Both times, the rocket stage hit its target but came in too hard, toppling and exploding on the ship’s deck. The launch has faced a number of delays, including one of almost six months caused by last year’s Falcon 9 launch failure.

Falcon 9 successfully landing in December.

Koenigsmann confirmed Friday that plans were still in place for the landing, which, if successful, would be the first of its kind. “We’re excited to get a ride to space and we hope SpaceX breaks a leg – but not literally a leg”, said Josh Willis, Jason-3 project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The idea behind these rocket landings – whether on land or drone ship- is to eventually make rockets reusable, like airplanes. For many, it will be what happens after the launch that’s most important. He also mentioned that the next few missions will be drone ships.

“Conducted hold-down firing of returned Falcon rocket”.

“Even at this relatively early stage, schedule pressures appear to be impacting safety”, said NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, or ASAP, in its 2015 annual report. Forecasts predict no weather issues as well.

To show us how cool the event really was, SpaceX has spliced together what is, essentially, a hype video – featuring footage from the command center, the craft and the landing pad.