autonomous_spaceport_drone_ship
The “autonomous spaceport drone ship” that SpaceX built to recover the Falcon 9 first stage.

SpaceX was unsuccessful in its inaugural attempt to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket softly on a barge in the ocean, the company reported overnight.

The company’s founder, Elon Musk, says the hard landing of the unmanned first stage still bodes well for future attempts to recover and reuse the rockets that blast SpaceX’s Dragon capsule into orbit to resupply the International Space Station.

The company had cautioned in advance that the landing on the 300×100 foot platform would be difficult, with a 50 percent chance of success, at most.

“Returning anything from space is a challenge, but returning a Falcon 9 first stage for a precision landing presents a number of additional hurdles,” explained SpaceX in a post last month. “At 14 stories tall and traveling upwards of 1300 m/s (nearly 1 mi/s), stabilizing the Falcon 9 first stage for reentry is like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm.”

SpaceX is challenging Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture over a patent on techniques for landing a rocket on an ocean platform.

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