A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship made a parachute return into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, while high winds in Florida scrapped plans for the company's Falcon rocket launch, NASA said.
The Dragon capsule departed the International Space Station at 2:10 pm, local time, and splashed down about 260 miles southwest of Long Beach, California, about 5-and-a-half hours later.
The Dragon is loaded with nearly 4,000 pounds of returning science experiments and equipment, including two faulty components from spacesuits that NASA wants to analyze before clearing astronauts for a trio of spacewalks later this month.
SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted,
SpaceX will try again at 6:03 pm, local time, on Wednesday to launch the US government's Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR. The satellite is designed to serve as weather buoy to provide about an hour's advance notice of potentially dangerous solar storms, which can disrupt radio communications, satellite signals and power grids on Earth.
It also will monitor the sun-lit side of Earth, tracking volcanic plumes, measuring ozone and monitoring droughts, flooding and fires.
Once the satellite is on its way to orbit, eventually reaching 930,000 miles from Earth, SpaceX plans to attempt to land the Falcon launcher's spent first stage, part of ongoing efforts to develop reusable rockets, potentially slashing launch costs.
The last Falcon rocket to fly nearly made it back intact, but it ran short of hydraulic fluid to maneuver steering fins and it crashed into the platform.
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