Liftoff Aborted: SpaceX Attempt at Historic Landing Delayed
paceX had to scrub Tuesday’s attempt to launch a Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station and make a historic rocket landing.
The landing experiment would have involved putting the first stage of the two-stage rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, about 200 miles off the coast of Florida. Such a feat has never been done before. A successful maneuver would have marked a significant step toward making rockets more reusable and driving down the cost of spaceflight.
But even SpaceX recognized that the rocket stage landing, which was due to take place minutes after launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, was not the mission’s main objective.
“The main mission is absolutely to get cargo to the station,” Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance at the California-based rocket company, told reporters during a pre-launch briefing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
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