Launch was great, landing was great. *Sticking* the landing… well, not so great.
Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing pic.twitter.com/eJWzN6KSJa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2015
Well, I guess now the program will be put on hold, Congress will get involved, there’ll be years of hearings and political posturing before another attempt is made… oh, wait. No, this is a private effort. Never mind, they’ll fly again in a month.
Here’s the cool thing: Unless the barge was trashed (I have no data on that)… NOTHING WAS LOST. It was an entirely successful launch! Even though the first stage booster was destroyed on landing… it was gonna get lost *anyway* if they didn’t try to recover it. So…w ell, ok, maybe they lost the cost of the landing gear, but that’s not exactly a lot.
Were this a NASA vehicle, the *landing* would have been the metric by which the launch was measured. Like if a VentureStar went into orbit, delivered its payload to the ISS, re-entered, and then pancaked onto the runway when the landing gear failed to lock. And then the program would be terminated.