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SpaceX Rocket vs. Robot Boat, Round 4! Tune in Live to the Grudge Fight
• WiredSpaceX's employees, watching from outside the glass-enclosed mission control room, were pretty stoked. (Seriously, you'd have thought they were watching a World Cup match, not a remote video feed of a rocket landing.)
But all that excitement that was just the undercard to this weekend's main event. On Sunday, after SpaceX launches the Jason-3 ocean-monitoring satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, it'll try another landing. But this one will continue the greatest matchup in modern times: Rocket vs. Robot Boat—Round 4!
So far, it's boat, 2; rocket, zero. And one tie. SpaceX has tried to set the booster down on an autonomous barge three times. The first time, in January 2015, the Falcon booster ran out of the hydraulic fluid necessary to direct its descent. It crashed. Three months later, the booster came in too hot. It looked good at first, then leaned a little bit. And then it crashed.