SpaceX wants to try and land a rocket on a floating platform again

SpaceX has confirmed that they will attempt another, more difficult, rocket landing on their next launch January 17th. Their Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with NASA’s Jason-3 satellite on board. This time the rocket will be returning to a “drone ship” (an autonomous floating platform) in the ocean rather than a launchpad on land like their last successful landing on December 21st. If they succeed, it will be the first successful rocket landing in the sea. Elon Musk named the autonomous drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” as a nod to the fictional starships in sci-fi novels written by the late Iain M. Banks. Just Read the Instructions, which was used in the previous SpaceX landings from Cape Canaveral, has been restored, modified and brought over to the West Coast for this launch. Landing a rocket on a floating drone ship at sea is much more difficult than landing it on stable ground. The sea itself is constantly in motion, which means you’re trying to land an already unstable rocket on a slightly unstable platform. When landing a rocket, so many things can go awry, so you’d really want to limit the number of variables that are constantly changing. It seems that it would make more sense for SpaceX to use its next few launches to continue to perfect the less difficult, but still incredibly complex, strategy of ground-based rocket landing.