SpaceX failed to land a Falcon 9 rocket on a barge on Friday night, striking the robotic ship in the Atlantic Ocean and disappointing billionaire Elon Musk in his quest to perfect the reusable rocket.

“Didn’t expect this one to work (v hot reentry), but next flight has a good chance,” Musk later reported on Twitter.

The rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 6.35pm ET, under clear skies, but engineers long had doubts about the attempted rocket landing a few minutes later because of the rocket’s payload: an 11,000lb satellite, one of its heaviest ever.

Lifting such a heavy satellite into orbit cost the Falcon 9’s lighter flights, meaning it had less fuel for its thrusters , which slowed its descent back to Earth and reoriented it for landing.

SpaceX had scrubbed three attempts, citing technical problems and high winds, to send a satellite for Luxembourg-based SES Satellite into orbit. The satellite will support telecommunications and broadcasts in Asia.

Musk wants to retrieve and refly boosters to save time and money. Usually, the boosters just fall into the sea. SES chief technology officer Martin Halliwell said last week that his company would have “no problem” launching a satellite on a recycled SpaceX rocket.

Late last year Musk’s private spaceflight company achieved a historic rocket landing at Cape Canaveral, but in January a new attempt to land the reusable rocket at sea failed. That rocket broke a leg on its “hard landing”, as engineers called it, and then teetered off the ship and exploded.



Thursday’s launch delivered a telecom satellite into orbit for SES, a Luxembourg-based company that operates a fleet of satellites for corporations and governments. The SES-9 satellite will provide broadcasting and maritime communications for a large swath of Asia and the Indian Ocean, according to the company.

Landing a rocket at sea requires less fuel than doing so on land – a ship can move to meet it. Musk and other engineers believe reusable rockets could revolutionize spaceflight because they would lower the cost of rockets: a standard Falcon 9 launch costs $61m. In theory, cheaper, reusable rockets would mean easier travel to and from space, and help free Nasa from onerous deals like its current $70m-per-astronaut contract with Russia.

Several other attempts to land Falcon 9s at sea last year also failed, and more than one version of the 157ft-tall rocket exploded or toppled in what Musk joked was a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”. The engineers have put a brave face on the crash landings, tweaking navigation software, landing trajectories and other details based on each test.

Another private spaceflight company, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, has twice landed a smaller, lighter rocket on solid ground in Texas. The Amazon billionaire’s New Shepard rocket is not designed to deliver satellites or cargo to the International Space Station, which orbits about 200 miles above the planet, but rather to take passengers to the edge of space, about 62 miles above Earth.

On other missions, SpaceX has delivered multiple satellites or supplies to astronauts, and its flights have made it the first private company to dock at the space station.

Thursday’s launch was originally scheduled for 24 February, but engineers delayed it “out of an abundance of caution” toward the temperature of the liquid oxygen that in part powers the rocket, a spokesperson said in a statement.