A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 8 carrying a Dragon spacecraft bound for the ISS.
They elected, though, to attempt another landing at sea. Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability at SpaceX, said at an April 7 prelaunch briefing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center that the company had the option of trying to bring the stage all the way back to Cape Canaveral, similar to the successful landing the company performed on a December launch. He added that, prior to the launch, he and his team estimated they had two-to-one odds of making a successful landing on this mission.
“The thing that was a little different about this mission on the rocket side was that the rocket landed instead of putting a hole in the ship or tipping over,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX chief executive, in a post-launch press conference April 8. On those previous attempts, the stage either crashed onto the desk of the ship or toppled over. SpaceX had made four previous efforts to land the stage on a ship, part of the company’s efforts to recover and eventually reuse the stage.
Video of the launch showed the stage landing on the ship eight and a half minutes after liftoff, to raucous cheers from SpaceX employees watching the launch at the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters.
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The rocket’s first stage, after separating from the second, performed a series of three burns to attempt a landing on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean downrange from the launch site.
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