Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) founder Elon Musk predicts the company will successfully land its booster stages in roughly 70 percent of attempts in 2016 and “hopefully” 90 percent in 2017, he said Jan. 18 in a Twitter post.
SpaceX on Jan. 17 successfully launched NASA’s Jason-3 radar altimeter from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. But the company almost landed the Falcon 9 booster stage on its water barge drone ship after video showed the rocket softly landing feet-first on the target in the center of the water barge before slowly toppling over and exploding.
Musk on Instagram attributed the rocket falling over to a “lockout collet” not latching on one of the four legs, possibly due to ice buildup from condensation from heavy fog at liftoff. An industry source said Jan. 18 SpaceX believes the lockout collet issue will be easy to fix and that choppy waters off the coast of California made the landing even more difficult.
Musk said water landings are not needed for flexibility or to save fuel costs, but because it wasn’t physically possible to return to the launch site on Jan. 17. The industry source said SpaceX doesn’t yet have the environmental permits to land at Vandenberg, but that the company is working toward them.
The Jan. 17 water landing attempt was SpaceX’s first attempt at landing on water following its successful ground landing in December. The industry source said the company’s next mission will be a launch for SES. He added the company hopes to keep a launch cadence of roughly two launches per month.
Jason-3 will measure sea-level variations over the global ocean with very high accuracy (as 1.3 inches or 3.3 centimeters, with a goal of achieving 1 inch or 2.5 centimeters), according to NASA. Continual, long-term, reliable data of changes in ocean surface topography will be generated and will be used by scientists and operational agencies (NOAA, European weather agencies, marine operators, among others) for scientific research and operational oceanography.