DSCOVR

DSCOVR had spent more than a decade in nitrogen-blanketed storage at Goddard Space Flight Center before it ever saw a launch pad. Conceived in 1998 as a continuous Earth-imaging satellite and originally named Triana, it was put on hold by Congress in 1999 and placed in storage in 2001, where it sat until NOAA funded its revival in 2008. On 11 February 2015, it finally left Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 — SpaceX's first mission aimed beyond geostationary transfer orbit and the company's first trajectory into interplanetary space, bound for the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

The Falcon 9 first stage made a controlled descent to the ocean after staging. Rough Atlantic weather had ruled out a drone ship landing, so SpaceX conducted an over-water touchdown test instead, bringing the stage down vertically within 10 metres of its target point — precision data for the program, if not a recovered booster.