SpaceX Launches Satellite but Fails to Land Reusable Rocket

SpaceX’s latest attempt to land a rocket upright on a platform in the Pacific Ocean failed in a spectacular fashion on Sunday. The cause of the crash was a failure in one of the “leg lockouts” which failed to latch, and thus caused the rocket to tip over once it cut engines and settled onto the deck.

A rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Sunday and successfully delivered an ocean-monitoring satellite into space, but it failed to stick the landing. When the Falcon 9 first stage returned to land on SpaceX’s “Just Follow the Instructions” autonomous landing barge, however, all did not go as planned.

Heavy fog at the rocket’s launch site in California may have caused condensation to collect in the latching mechanism and then ice it over, said technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, owner and chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

In April 2015, the Falcon 9 crashed in another attemped drone ship landing due to “slower than expected throttle valve response”, according to Musk.

Watch a replay of the launch via the SpaceX video embedded above.

SpaceX hopes to reduce launch costs by reusing rockets rather than having them fall into the ocean. In December, the company completed a successful vertical landing of a rocket in Florida.

After Sunday’s launch, Bezos congratulated the company on Twitter.

Everything went smooth and by the numbers for the launch and insertion of the new Jason-3 satellite into a polar orbit around the Earth.

Another company official said the botched landing was secondary to the successful launch of the weather satellite. Like its predecessors, Jason-3 is equipped with radar altimeter to bounce microwave energy off the ocean and a GPS system to identify the satellite’s precise location.

NASA says the U.S.-European Jason-3 satellite is in orbit and “ready for science operations”. Mission scientists emphasized at a prelaunch briefing that it was important to maintain a continuous record of global sea level variation.

The satellite is created to gather data on oceans, including tracking global sea level rise. The cost of the mission, including five years of operation, was put at $180 million.