'Close but no cigar' for SpaceX's try at historic rocket landing

The private space-exploration company successfully sends a cargo capsule off to the International Space Station, but its "reusable" rocket crashes into its floating landing pad in the Atlantic Ocean.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifts off early Saturday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. An attempt to land the rocket on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean was unsuccessful. NASA

SpaceX almost made history on Saturday. Almost.

As part of its NASA-contracted mission to resupply the International Space Station, the private space-exploration company was attempting to launch the "world's first reusable rocket" and then land it on a landing pad floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

The launch, which was scrapped earlier this week because of a problem with a rocket part, went off without a hitch at 4:47 a.m. local time at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, according to NASA.

SpaceX's 14-story Falcon 9 rocket also successfully sent a Dragon cargo capsule on its way to the space station. But when the first stage of the Falcon 9 returned to Earth, it crashed into its 300-by-100-foot floating landing pad.

"Close, but no cigar this time," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted Saturday morning. "Bodes well for the future tho."

SpaceX is one of a handful of private companies pursuing spaceflight, a realm once solely controlled by government space agencies. But the task isn't easy. In August, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a test flight. And in October, space-tourism company Virgin Galactic saw one of its space planes crash during a test flight, a mishap that killed one of the plane's two pilots.

Before Saturday's launch, SpaceX had put the odds of a successful landing at 50 percent "at best" and likened hitting the bull's eye to "trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm."

SpaceX has already started assessing what went wrong, and Musk tweeted an initial finding: "Grid fins worked extremely well from hypersonic velocity to subsonic, but ran out of hydraulic fluid right before landing." The grid fins are an upgrade for the rocket and are designed to move independently to help with landing, according to SpaceX.

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'Close but no cigar' for SpaceX's try at historic rocket landing