SpaceX Crashed Another Rocket Onto an Ocean Barge

Holiday weekends are meant for relaxing things like Netflix and NFL football, right? Not at SpaceX!

Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Sunday launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets into low-Earth orbit to deploy a satellite for some of its government partners, including NASA. The rocket launch was nothing new — SpaceX has launched plenty over the past few years and the satellite was successfully deployed. The trick on Sunday? Returning the rocket, in one piece, onto a floating barge out in the Pacific ocean.

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/688577089679708160

Sounds pretty spectacular! Unfortunately, it didn’t work (although not for lack of accuracy). The rocket came down on target but had issues with one of its landing legs, according to a tweet from Musk.

Update: Here’s a video of the landing — which was incredibly close — that Musk shared to his Instagram followers.

Falcon lands on droneship, but the lockout collet doesn't latch on one the four legs, causing it to tip over post landing. Root cause may have been ice buildup due to condensation from heavy fog at liftoff.

A video posted by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Jan 17, 2016 at 7:07pm PST

Sunday was the third time SpaceX attempted an ocean landing. It crashed two rockets in 2015 attempting the same thing. Those crashes also resulted in some pretty surreal video footage you can watch below. SpaceX did return a rocket successfully on land to Cape Canaveral late last month.

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/688799901463883776

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/688814634489413632

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/688816554306191360

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMSzC1crr0

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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