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SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket On A Floating Drone Ship For The First Time (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: SpaceX has finally landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea, after launching the vehicle into space this afternoon. It's the first time the company has been able to pull off an ocean landing, after four previous attempts ended in failure. This is the second time SpaceX has successfully landed one of its rockets post-launch; the first time was in December, when the company's Falcon 9 rocket touched down at a ground-based landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after putting a satellite into space. Now that SpaceX has demonstrated it can do both types of landings, the company can potentially recover and reuse even more rockets in the future. And that could mean much greater cost savings for SpaceX.
A rock is a larger more masculine form of a rockette.
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They've actually landed successfully on land prior, this was their first success on a ship at sea. The last attempt it landed, then tipped over when a support leg broke, so i'd guess they reinforced that or something. I'm sure they'll have a few more fireballs, but my money is on them getting the landing down consistently very soon.
When I first started SpaceX I wanted to land a booster in the ocean. Everyone said I was daft to try to land a booster in the ocean, but I built in all the same, just to show them. First time, it crashed into the ocean. So I built a second and third one. They sank into the ocean as well. So I built a fourth. That landed, fell over, then sank into the ocean. But the fifth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get folks, first stages that land on autonomous barges with weird names in the middle of the ocean.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!