New Delhi: Tesla founder Elon Musk's spacecraft company SpaceX re-attempted to launch the Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday morning. Though the rocket shot the Jason-3 ocean-measuring satellite into the orbit successfully, it failed in its attempt to land the spent first stage on a ship in the ocean.
The rocket shot on time at 10: 42 a.m. PST (1842 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California, but 25 minutes after liftoff, the first stage suffered a hard landing and exploded as leg 3 didn't lockout and was within 1.3 meters of the drone ship center. Musk later posted a video of the attempted landing and the explosion that followed on Instagram.
The offshore landing attempt follows on the heels of SpaceX's successful Falcon 9 rocket landing on a land-based pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on December 21, which was considered an important milestone in the space industry and a big step toward making rockets reusable.
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