Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A SpaceX resupply craft carrying over 5,000 pounds of experiments and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) successfully lifted off this morning. More importantly, though, it successfully landed its booster rocket on a barge at sea, something that’s never been done before.
The launch took place at 4:47am ET this morning, sending the Dragon module and the 5,108 pounds of food, water, clothing and research projects on a trajectory to the ISS, James Vincent and Arielle Duhaime-Ross of The Verge reported on Saturday. It is the fifth of SpaceX’s 12 cargo resupply missions under the company’s $1.6 billion contract with NASA.
However, the successful launch only tells half the story, as after the Falcon 9 booster jettisoned the cargo capsule, it returned to Earth, landing on a barge located in the waters 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. This part wasn’t completely successful, though, as Elon Musk tweeted this morning.
Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 10, 2015
The rocket, which was 70 feet wide and 14 stories tall, was attempting to land on a target that was just 300 feet across and 100 feet wide, the website said. SpaceX had placed their chances of success at 50-50, but mission assurance chief Hans Koenigsmann told National Geographic that the remote-controlled landing attempt would be “extremely challenging” and said that he was not optimistic about the first attempt at the procedure being successful.
While Koenigsmann noted during a NASA briefing held last week that the landing attempt would be “pretty exciting,” he emphasized that the primary mission was “to get cargo to the space station.” Nonetheless, much of the talk about the mission has centered around the attempt to secure the Falcon 9 rocket so that it could be repaired and reused during future launches.
As Nat Geo pointed out, SpaceX had previously landed rocket stages on land, and had previously made a controlled landing on water following a launch (a maneuver which still led to the loss of the rocket stage). Musk has previously said that barge landings would enable easier recovery of the launch vehicles, thus allowing them to be used again and reducing the cost of sending them into space.
As for the Dragon spacecraft itself, NASA reports that it will now begin a two-day orbital pursuit of the space station, and is expected to rendezvous with the facility on Monday morning. NASA astronaut and Expedition 42 Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore will used the station’s robotic arm to capture the capsule at approximately 6am ET.
It will then be installed into the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module, where it will remain for the next four weeks before departing. The Dragon will be filled with nearly two tons of samples, experiments and equipment from the ISS, and will ultimately slash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, the US space agency said.
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