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SpaceX's mission to launch the most powerful rocket on Earth into space has been a rousing success . Apart from one thing.
The rocket took off without a single hitch, detached its side boosters and saw them sail back down to the ground, and delivered its strange payload into orbit. A Tesla car and a dummy wearing a space suit are now floating around in space because of the Falcon Heavy's help.
But one important thing went wrong. SpaceX had hoped that the central core of the rocket – the middle bit in the triad of pieces that made up the rocket itself – would come back down and land on its droneship in the ocean.
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU)
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it
ESA/Hubble & NASA
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station
Nasa/Scott Kelly
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ESA/Hubble & NASA
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NASA & ESA
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Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan
(NASA/Bill Ingalls)
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It didn't make its way back down safely, and has now been lost. That's a little scuff in an otherwise thoroughly successful mission, but an important one.
SpaceX hopes that it can successfully and dependably land the rockets back on Earth, so they can be re-used. If it manages to do so, these impressive launches could become far more cheap and common, since they'll not have to build a new rocket each time.
The fate of the central core was a mystery for hours after the otherwise successful launch. As the rocket arrived, the video from the cameras on the barge completely cut – and there was no mention at all of what had happened to it.
That was despite the rocket having apparently made its way safely back down to Earth. Hundreds of people took to Twitter to ask SpaceX what had happened, worried amid no new information about what had happened to perhaps the most impressive part of the Falcon Heavy.
Now it has emerged that the central core completely missed the droneship and crashed into the ocean that it was floating on. It did so at incredible speed, said SpaceX boss Elon Musk, landing "about 100 metres away from the landing pad, which was enough to take out two thrusters and shower the deck with shrapnel".
That should make for some stunning footage if the cameras on the barge managed to catch it. "If we got the footage ... that sounds like some pretty fun footage, if the cameras didn't get blown up as well, then we'll put that up ... for - you know - just the blooper reel," Mr Musk said.
It wouldn't be the first time that a SpaceX rocket has failed to land properly on its barge, in spectacular fashion, and been caught on video doing so.
But since that initial failure, the mission to land rockets back on the ground has been far more successful. Indeed, the two side boosters landed on the ground for the second time – they'd successfully travelled into space before, having some blackened parts to show for their previous journey.
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