The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) founded by billionaire Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk published a high resolution, slow motion video which shows the company’s CRS-6 rocket’s First Stage attempting to land on a floating SpaceX platform vessel after its successful mission to the International Space Station — and just when it looks like it might actually pull it off, failure becomes evident as the First Stage erupts in a fiery explosion.
The video, which was published on April 15, 2015, received over 13,000 “likes” on YouTube where it had been viewed of 3 million times.
A report on NASA Space Flight referred to the recent landing attempt as the best to date while explaining that the stage was unable to remain upright after it hit the deck “at a slight angle” with “too much velocity”.
As a result of the unsuccessful landing attempt, the stage was lost, however, SpaceX is intent on giving it another shot and plans to do so upon the return leg of the CRS-7 launch.
Musk tweeted to his nearly 2 million Twitter followers about the video’s existence on Wednesday while indicating in his tweet that the video was a “color corrected,” high resolution, slow motion video of the rocket’s landing attempt.
High resolution, color corrected, slow motion rocket landing video https://t.co/UTF3Y4xGU3
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2015
The barge which serves as the floating landing platform intended to catch the rocket on its return trip was located in the Atlantic Ocean, according to an ARS Technica report. The report also quotes Musk — who is, among other things, the CEO of SpaceX — as having stated in a since deleted tweet that the rocket appeared to have been afflicted with a “stiction in the biprop throttle valve” which resulted “in control system phase lag.”
In a similar sequence, the company successfully launched a Falcon 9 into space which crashed when the company attempted to land it back on Earth.
