SpaceX misses landing on a drone ship in the ocean, breaking the company's streak
Well, landing rockets back on Earth isn't quite routine yet after all.
Elon Musk's private spaceflight company SpaceX failed to stick what would have been the company's fourth consecutive successful landing of a rocket booster back on Earth on Wednesday morning.
Instead, the Falcon 9 was seen on a company webcast landing on part of a drone ship in the Atlantic, shrouded in thick smoke and flames.
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The Falcon 9 first stage booster successfully made it back to the the drone ship, but the booster didn't survive the landing.
"Unfortunately it appears as though we lost the vehicle," one of the SpaceX announcers said during the company's webcast, adding that they did get good data from the failure.
Just after the landing, it wasn't immediately clear whether it was successful or not, with many people speculating about what happened on Twitter.
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This booster would have been the fourth to land on a drone ship, with one other booster making it back to land in Florida at the end of 2015.
It's important to keep in mind that the main point of this mission was to launch two communications satellites to orbit, and that part of the mission appears to have gone quite smoothly.
Landings like these are still in the experimental phase for SpaceX, and are part of the company's strategy to lower the cost of access to space by reusing expensive rocket boosters.
This landing was never going to be easy, either.
The communications satellites are destined for an orbit tens of thousands of miles above the planet, meaning that the first stage of the Falcon 9 needed to burn fast and hot, using a lot of fuel, before coming back in for the landing.
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Because of that high velocity, there was less fuel available to slow the booster down for a vertical landing.
"The first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing difficult," SpaceX wrote in a press kit before launch.
Musk, the company's founder, has said that SpaceX is planning to re-fly one of the boosters it has successfully landed sometime in September or October this year.
Traditionally, expensive rocket bodies are discarded into space after launching payloads to orbit. SpaceX hopes to disrupt that norm by bringing its boosters back home, refurbishing them and then flying other missions with those recycled rockets.
That reusability, in theory, could greatly reduce the cost of flying to space, making it much easier to send payloads to orbit for just the cost of the fuel needed to get there.
It's not just SpaceX aiming for that goal.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company, is also hoping to create a fleet of reusable rockets that can launch to suborbital space and eventually on orbital missions.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
