CRS-5

The booster reached the ship. That had never happened before — no rocket had ever attempted a drone ship landing — but reaching it was not enough. On 10 January 2015, after CRS-5 lifted from Cape Canaveral and placed Dragon C107 on course for the ISS, the Falcon 9 first stage descended toward the autonomous spaceport drone ship Just Read the Instructions in the North Atlantic. Grid fins, fitted to a Falcon 9 for the first time on this flight, exhausted their hydraulic fluid in the final seconds of approach, and the stage hit the deck hard.

The wreckage told less of the story than the telemetry. Precision guidance had brought a rocket booster to within striking distance of a target in the open ocean; the hydraulics would be refined, the attempt repeated. Three more drone ship attempts followed before the first clean landing, fifteen months later.