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SpaceX's Latest Launch Successful, But Ends With a "Hard Landing" (theverge.com)
Eloking writes with this news from The Verge: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space this afternoon, but — as expected — failed to land the vehicle on a drone ship at sea afterward. CEO Elon Musk said the rocket 'landed hard' on the drone ship. The mission requirements made a successful landing unlikely. This was SpaceX's fourth attempt to land the Falcon 9 post-launch on an autonomous drone ship floating in the ocean. All of the previous sea landings failed too, though the third attempt came very close. The company had low hopes of a successful landing from the start of this mission, since the rocket had to send a heavy satellite into a high orbit. That requires a lot of fuel for the launch itself, so there wasn't much fuel left for the rocket's return to Earth and powered landing.
"When NASA has a launch failure or even a postponement it's nightly news, complete with commentary as to how it's all a waste of money, government can't do things right, etc."
The public expects a government space program to be run with perfect safety, which everyone in the business knows is as unattainable as safe aviation was in 1920, and that it must not do anything "adventurous" like landing a booster, even if the activity is not mission-critical and does not pose any threat to human life. Manned space programs have to go private not because NASA is incompetent, but because only the private sector is allowed to take risks.
I don't think it was "almost." That describes the landing when the first stage touched down then tipped over.
There wasn't really much of an expectation it would be successful anyway. The largest problem was that there was very little reserve fuel left in the rocket due to the fact that nearly all of the fuel needed to get the payload delivered to GEO (also due to the heavier payload itself) that it wasn't really thought that the rocket could land.
SpaceX basically made an attempt anyway. Close in this case is that the rocket ran out of fuel when it was close (in proportion) to hovering velocity, but 1%-2% of the original velocity when it was in space was still going way too fast to land gently.