First images of SpaceX booster barge landing released

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

SpaceX chief Elon Musk has revealed the first images of last week’s attempt to land a booster rocket on a barge at sea, shedding new light as to exactly what went wrong and how close the procedure was to being a complete and total success.

The images were posted by Musk to his Twitter account in response to an inquiry by Oculus VR CTO and video game developer John Carmack. In captioning them, Musk explained that the fins of the Falcon 9 booster ran out of fuel and lost power, causing them to go hard over.

The engines attempted to restore the rocket to its proper landing angle, but were successful, and as a result the booster came in hard at a 45 degree angle. As a result, the engine section and the legs were smashed, and residual fuel combined with oxygen caused an explosion to occur.

“Though the sequence of images looks pretty dramatic, Musk says the ship is ‘fine’ and in need of ‘minor repairs,’” according to Mashable. The website called the maneuver “a brave precision landing attempt no one has attempted before,” and said that Musk believes that the outcome of the experimental landing “bodes well for the future.”

As the International Business Times explained, the landing attempt was part of SpaceX’s plan to reduce the cost of space travel by reusing booster rockets. The company had hoped to recover its Falcon 9 after landing it on the ocean barge so that it could be used on future missions.

Musk originally had claimed that no good images of the landing had been captured, the website added, but later explained that a handful of impact video frames were recovered from a drone ship. He went on to tell Carmack (and the social media world, for that matter) that those images were “kinda begging to be released.”

The Falcon 9, 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. SpaceX had pegged their chances of success at 50-50, but mission assurance chief Hans Koenigsmann called it an “extremely challenging” maneuver, telling National Geographic that he was not optimistic that it would be successful.

Koenigsmann noted during a NASA briefing held last week that the landing attempt would be “pretty exciting,” but emphasized that the primary goal was “to get cargo to the [International Space Station].” That part of the mission was successfully completed with the arrival of the company’s Dragon capsule and its over two tons of supplies at the ISS  earlier this week.

The launch took place at 4:47am ET on the morning of January 10, as the Falcon 9 and the Dragon module lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission was the fifth of 12 cargo resupply missions under SpaceX’s $1.6 billion contract with NASA, and involved the transport of 5,108 pounds of food, water, clothing and research projects to the orbiting base.

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