Elon Musk Shares Dramatic Footage Of His SpaceX Rocket Exploding Into A Fireball On Landing
Space travel is difficult, no one knows that more than Elon Musk who recently shared a video on his personal Instagram account of the dramatic footage that resulted after his SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landed on a floating barge in the Pacific Ocean, then toppled over and exploded.
The Falcon 9 was successful in its main mission though, which was to deliver a payload into space. You can watch the footage of the explosion in the video above and on Musk's Instagram post below.
Musk has been developing the Falcon 9 since 2005 and in 2012 it delivered their Dragon spacecraft into orbit around the International Space Station, making them the first commercial company to visit the ISS.
The ultimate goal is is to build a reusable rocket and successfully launch, deliver it's payload and land again on a floating platform (droneship)—something his competitor Jeff Bezos' company has already done.
SpaceX have already achieved this back in December 22nd 2015 on land, putting 11 small satellites into low orbit for Orbcomm's (ORBC) new satellite network, but this recent mission failure at sea is something of a setback.
But by posting the video of the failure it proves how difficult the task is and how accurate that landing needs to be.
Ship landings are not needed for flexibility or to save fuel costs. Just not physically possible to return to launch site
By learning from every failure they get closer to their goal of building a rocket that can safely re-enter and land. Which will make space travel much less expensive, something good for both space tourism and for our continuing exploration of the cosmos.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of space company Blue Origin Tweeted his congratulations on the successful payload delivery and expressed some encouraging words of support around the landing failure.
"Falcon lands on droneship, but the lockout collet doesn't latch on one the four legs," Musk explained in his Instagram post below about why it exploded. "causing it to tip over post landing. Root cause may have been ice buildup due to condensation from heavy fog at liftoff."