....confirmed by Elon Musk. They hit the ship but too hard for the stage to survive the impact. It'll get there I'm sure !

Had a good view of the capsule passing over here in the south of England as it was quite bright and on a lovely cloudless night.

Our children watched the launch then we all headed outside to watch it pass over 20 minutes later. They were most impressed to see science/spaceflight in action :ok:

Video from chase plane is here: https://vine.co/v/euEpIVegiIx

Looks like they almost got it this time, but it was still tilting a little when it landed (or maybe that was the start of tipping over).

Apparently they think it was due to the throttle valve sticking so it wasn't responding as fast as expected; which would explain the apparent overcompensation in the video. In that case, hopefully the next time will work.

Come on guys get it to work, after all it's not rocket scien...

New video, and much better resolution. That looks really close to a survivable landing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMSzC1crr0

SpaceX To Land Reusable Launcher on Ground

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — SpaceX hopes that the next attempt to land its Falcon 9 reusable launch vehicle will occur on solid ground. While not providing details of when or where that attempt would occur, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX President and COO, told Defense News on Wednesday that the company hopes its next attempted landing will take place on land, not at sea.

All tests of the reusable vehicle have occurred over water as a safety precaution, but the natural instability that occurs when a landing pad floating in the ocean has a very heavy rocket land on top of it has led to a series of near-misses for the technology. The most recent test of the technology occurred Tuesday, when the rocket appeared to land on target safely before tipping over. The hope is that the added stability of landing on ground would allow a safe landing.

"Just purely the boat moving, even in a low sea state, it's hard to imagine that vehicle is going to stay vertical," Shotwell said. "That vehicle is big and tall, compared to the itty-bity-greater-than-a-football-field-size ship."

She also downplayed the potential risk factors that led the company to attempt its landings over water in the first place. "The risk of damage to the public of ascent is far greater than return," she said. "There's a lot of propellant going up, and there's very little propellant coming back. "

She also noted that there will be a flight termination system in place in case something goes wrong. "It's a lot harder to think about blowing up that rocket when you're going up and it has a payload on board," Shotwell said. "But when it's coming back, if things look wonky, blow it up.".......

Musk posted on Twitter, saying they've confirmed the problem was slow throttle response. So things are looking good for next time if they can fix that or work around it.

Next try: Streamcoverage (NASA TV) and ticker at Live coverage: All systems go for SpaceX resupply launch | Spaceflight Now

SpaceX own stream will start in about one hour.

Launch vehicle failure. Seen a few of those in my career, always upsetting.

Ooops......

Not sure if that was an auto-destruct, but it's gone, one way or another.....

Buggah !lllllll

There did seem a lot of strange effects in the exhaust trail prior to failure, but they were calling thrust nominal at the time.

a lot of strange effects in the exhaust trail

A design problem is matching the exhaust nozzle of a "rocket" engine to external pressure at the point of ignition, through the flight and up to MECO. The exhaust does tend to spread with altitude. However I agree it didn't look as consistant a burn as I would have thought.

http://i.imgur.com/VMqgXA9.jpg

Vehicle destroyed before MECO.

Launch replay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuNymhcTtSQ

It was a timing error. The mission computer was inexplicably set to July 4th and not June 28th.

They said something about excessive pressure in the second stage oxygen tank, so it's possible pieces of the second stage could have been falling off before they blew it up. Or maybe liquid oxygen leaking out?

Following a nominal liftoff, Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown, resulting in loss of mission. Preliminary analysis suggests the vehicle experienced an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank approximately 139 seconds into flight. Telemetry indicates first stage flight was nominal and that Dragon remained healthy for some period of time following separation.

Our teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and we will be able to provide more information following a thorough fault tree analysis. Below is a link to the CRS-7 post launch briefing with representatives from SpaceX, NASA and the FAA, additional updates will be posted as they become available.

I told you not to press that button unless I told you to.