After making three successful ocean landings in a row, SpaceX has crashed a Falcon 9 rocket into its autonomous spaceport drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You.
The rocket had launched from Cape Canaveral last Wednesday at 10:43 AM ET, gracefully decoupling from its second stage, as the first stage flew towards the ship in order to attempt what would have been the fourth landing in a row.
Instead, viewers of the SpaceX drone ship's external camera saw an interruption in the feed just as the rocket made its landing. Amidst the cloud of smoke from its engines, the Falcon 9 rocket could still be seen standing, before video was lost.
Shortly after, a SpaceX engineer announced on the website that the Falcon 9 was destroyed in the landing attempt. In a series of tweets, CEO Elon Musk indicated the cause of the failure to be insufficient thrust on one of the landing engines, and described the failed landing as "maybe hardest impact to date," reconfirming that the spacecraft underwent a "RUD" or "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly." A fairly tongue-in-cheek way of saying that it blew up.
While somewhat tragic, this failure wasn't completely unexpected - prior to the launch, SpaceX had warned that this would be a particularly challenging landing due to the high orbit of the mission parameters.
In any case, the rocket successfully delivered its payload of Eutelsat and ABS satellites, and SpaceX has learned more about the dynamics of landing burning vessels full of flammable chemicals from high in the sky, onto tiny floating boats in the middle of the sea.
The company has indicated that their next launch on July 16 will resupply the International Space Station, and will then feature a landing attempt at Cape Canaveral - their last landing on solid ground was the wildly successful and celebrated landing last December.
