SpaceX experiment with Falcon rocket soft landing fails

#SpaceX #Dragon #ElonMusk #Falcon9 The American SpaceX firm has revealed that its experiment with soft landing of its Falcon rocket on a floating sea platform was not successful. The vehicle was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a mission to send a cargo capsule to the International Space Station.
However, once the first-stage of the rocket completed its part of this task, it tried to make a controlled return and hit the platform hard – this was confirmed by the company CEO Elon Musk via tweet.
SpaceX will keep trying in order to prove this type of capability because, it would be a method to reduce the costs dramatically because it would pave the way for normally disposable rockets to be recovered, refurbished and re-used. If successful it would mean tremendous savings in the cost of flights.
Moreover, it might also point to new ways of bringing spacecraft back down to Earth in general and change the way we look at space flight at present.
The present system is that rockets have an expendable architecture. Once airborne, they discard engines and empty propellant tanks to save the weight so that their upper-stage, including the satellite payload, can jump to orbit. The unwanted hardware is discarded and heads to Earth and disintegrates en-route and, hence, an expensive rocket is required for each launch – that is what SpaceX is aiming to do, to eliminate such wastages.

Mars calling – working on alternate method to get to the Red Planet

#Hohmanntransfer #marsmission The temptation to go to the Red Planet is forcing scientists to work overtime and come up with alternate methods to go to Mars. While the traditional missions involve large rockets for both blasting off and slowing down during landing, researchers feel that there may be a simpler, cheaper way.
Their thinking is that instead of blasting off to the red planet and using rockets to slow themselves down, future craft could use planetary gravity fields to 'drift' into the Martian atmosphere. That is a new and revolutionary theory of putting the gravity of Mars to latch on to the spacecraft and pull it down.
Such a method, termed as ballistic capture, could be a great help to open the Martian frontier for more robotic missions, future manned expeditions and even colonization efforts. It seems NASA has expressed an interest in this method. As James Green, director of NASAs Planetary Science Division has commented - 'it's an eye-opener … it could be a pretty big step for us and really save us resources and capability, which is always what we're looking for.'
Traditional missions use rockets to shoot for the location Mars will be in its orbit where the spacecraft will meet it - known as a Hohmann transfer. The process would be to put the spacecraft into a Mars-like orbit so that it flies ahead of the planet, and keeps slowing down until it is pulled in by the gravitational force. This unique method could one day be used for manned missions to Mars – only, it would add several more months to mission times.