MEXICO: Billionaire inventor Elon Musk-led aero space firm SpaceX will make another attempt to land a Falcon 9 rocket on an ocean platform after it dispatches a Dragon cargo ship toward the International Space Station (ISS).
The blast off of the spaceship atop SapceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was set for 10:21 a.m. local time (1421 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company will attempt to land the rocket on a platform floating in the Atlantic Ocean, northeast of its launch site at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Hans Koenigsmann, vice president for mission assurance at SpaceX, said, “SpaceX pushes innovation and part of that is to learn from your experiments, your trials. You look at the data, you evaluate this and then you make correction. That’s ultimately how you succeed, in my opinion, to make a safe landing in the end.”
During previous two attempts to vertically land the rocket on a floating platform failed to produce desired results. During the first attempt in January, the 14-storey rocket ran out of hydraulic fluid and the attempt failed.
Another attempt was made in April, and the company nearly nailed it. The rocket’s descent through the atmosphere was quite successful, but nearly 10 seconds before the touchdown a valve had a glitch and the platform suffered damages.
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