Evening Launch (but still no landing)

[krpalmer]

After several delays, I managed to see the launch of another Falcon 9 rocket through NASA's streaming video. This time, it was launching a satellite that had been repurposed from what had first seemed a public outreach effort to take "whole Earth" photos into an early-warning system for solar storms (although it's still supposed to take pictures of Earth too; I just hope I can remember to follow up on that by the time it reaches its operating distance.) More than that, I was wondering if this time the effort to bring the first stage to a safe landing on a barge at sea would work; it did turn out after all that some video of the flaming, off-balance crash of the previous stage has been made public. However, while the launch was into a clear early-evening sky, weather out in the ocean seems to have been rougher, and the stage again just dropped into the water. Once more I'm left thinking "better luck next time."