The central core of the Falcon Heavy rocked after landing

WASHINGTON – The center of the Falcon Heavy rocket, which launched a communications satellite on April 11, collapsed after landing in rough seas, but SpaceX said the incident would not affect future launches .

In a statement on April 15, SpaceX said that the booster core, one of three on the Falcon Heavy rocket, was unable to stand during the weekend, the big sea preventing crews from securing it on the bridge of the drone. Of course I still love you in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Over the weekend, because of the rough seas, SpaceX's recovery team has not been able to secure the center's reminder for its return trip to Port Canaveral" said spokesman James Gleeson in response to a SpaceNews survey. "As the conditions worsened with swells from eight to ten feet, the booster started to change and was finally unable to stand."

SpaceX has developed a robotic system, commonly known as Octograbber (Octograbber), to secure Falcon 9 booster cores that land on drones. Company sources, however, indicated that the Octograbber was not working on the Falcon Heavy because it had different interfaces that the robot was not designed to attack, which required the use of staff that could not operate safely in heavy weather. "Even if we had hoped to bring the recall back intact, the safety of our team always takes precedence," said Gleeson.

SpaceX has not provided any information on the status of the kernel, including whether it will be recovered. The drone has yet to return to Port Canaveral, the port next to Cape Canaveral Air Base in Florida, where SpaceX is organizing salvage operations for boosters landing at sea.

The incident tainted what had been a second perfect flight of the heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center's 39A launch complex. The rocket successfully placed its payload, the Arabsat-6A communications satellite, into a geostationary transfer orbit. The two boosters landed side by side in the former 13 launch complex at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, several kilometers south of the launch site.

SpaceX also recovered the two halves of the payload fairing in the ocean shortly after their fall. SpaceX General Manager Elon Musk told a tweet a few hours after the launch the refit will be redone when SpaceX's Starlink broadband constellation is launched later this year, which could be the first reuse of the vehicle's fairings.

Both boosters will be re-used at the next launch of Falcon Heavy, as part of the Air Force Space Test Program (STP) 2 mission, which will ship a number of technology demonstration satellites. However, even before the central nucleus of the Arabsat launch was lost after landing, SpaceX planned to use a new core reinforcement core for the launch of STP-2. "We do not expect future missions will be affected" by the loss of the Arabsat amplifier, Gleeson said.

The launch of STP-2 is scheduled to take place in June, although no official launch date has been set. The Space and Missile Systems Center of the Air Force, in a tweet of April 15th, said side cores "will require analysis to determine their reusability". The launch, he said, was not planned until June.