SpaceX Booster ‘Anomaly'

When the main booster was on its way back to Cape Canaveral from the totally successful Dragon Space Station resupply mission, everything looked normal until the downward-looking TV image of the landing field began to rotate and wobble. The live TV feed from SpaceX promptly stopped. We knew something was wrong. Later, they came back on the air again and gave a fully transparent discussion of what had gone wrong and showed all the video that we had missed.

That booster-mounted camera showed the view directly downward through the flames of the final landing burn, the unwelcome spinning and then an abrupt change in the direction the booster was going. All we now saw was water. Then the vehicle slowed down, the three landing legs deployed, it slowly got closer to the ocean and it stopped and hovered with the legs right at the wave-tops. It was as if it had landed. Then, of course, it sank into the Atlantic and tipped over on its side. The video feed from the vehicle showed all that, too..

The mission director then explained that despite loosing thrust direction control in the final moment, almost everything went right! Once the on-board software detected that an anomaly had occurred, it diverted to Plan-B which was it to ditch in the ocean. The last thing SpaceX wants is to have it land in a parking lot or on a building. Plan-B worked perfectly, the booster retargeted its landing spot, it flew there, extended its legs, came to a stop and essentially "landed." What's more it then went through a twenty minute "post touchdown" program to vent dangerous gasses, close safety valves, do an orderly shut-down of the electrical system and safe-lock the hydraulics. All that happened while it was bobbing in the waves. All of it is necessary to make the booster safe for ground crews to approach after a normal landing.

At this point it is a big empty fuel tank .... very buoyant. Elon Musk later said that they would refurbish it and use it for internal flight testing. Probaly no paying customer would want to fly with it.

You have to love SpaceX.