As of today, most of the oceans have not been explored. GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of The Oceans) is a non-profit organization, which relies largely on the voluntary contributions of an enthusiastic international team of geoscientists and hydrographers. The purpose of GEBCO is to provide the most authoritative publicly-available bathymetry of the world's oceans.
GEBCO produces charts and digital grids of the world oceans with data contributed from many reliable sources.
When the 3,351-TEU container ship Rena grounded off New Zealand in 2011, the cargo losses totaled $1 billion, and the salvage operation took seven months.
The loss pales in comparison to what’s at stake as the latest generation of container ships approach 20,000 20-foot-equivalent units.
“The Rena, next to an ultra-large container ship, would be like an average-sized 2-year-old next to Shaquille O’Neal,” Chris Smith, senior vice president of ocean marine at Endurance Insurance, said at an American Institute of Marine Underwriters seminar last May.
“Pick a figure: $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion. A grounding by an ultra-large container ship with a large capacity cannot be ruled out, and the loss could be $4 billion.”
And, while it took seven months to clean up the Rena, it “could take two years to remove all the containers from a 19,000-TEU ship in the event of an incident, assuming that it was possible at all,” Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty Insurance wrote in its Safety and Shipping Review 2015, released in January.
Total Losses by Top 10 Regions: 2005-2014 and 2014
Source: Lloyd’s List Intelligence Casualty Statistics. Analysis: AGCS
The risk of such a catastrophic loss only increases as more mega-vessels begin calling at ports around the world that have never seen ships of that length, width and depth.
More alarming, according to a new report from the Global Marine Practice at insurance brokerage Marsh, is that accurate surveys of ocean depths — or bathymetrics, the underwater equivalent of topography — are inadequate or nonexistent in large expanses of the world, with many areas either having no survey or having surveys that haven’t been verified since being done more than a century ago.
Using robots to map shallow water on nautical charts Autonomous surface vehicles conduct surveys in shallow waters where hydrographic vessels can’t reach. NOAA is using this ASV to map a very popular inlet where boaters have found that nautical charts aren’t always 100% up to date.
Storms can shift sand bars and deep areas can become shallow. The data from ASVs is used to update NOAA’s publicly available nautical charts to help keep boaters safe.
In the U.S., at least, bathymetric surveys have been performed to modern standards on 75 percent of navigationally significant waters, according to Royal Navy Rear Adm. Tim Lowe, the U.K.’s national hydrographer.
That’s superior to many other developed and undeveloped countries, including the U.K. itself, which has adequate surveys on less than half of its coastal waters.
Other shipping giants fare even worse, including Japan, 46 percent; Australia, 35 percent; Panama and the Philippines, 25 percent each, according to the International Hydrographic Organization, the intergovernmental institution that coordinates the world’s coverage of official nautical charts.
Navigation routes to the Panama Canal, for example, have been the same for years, with cargo vessels following “tried-and-tested pathways,” the Marsh report found.
But what’s safe for a vessel requiring 40 feet of draft may not be safe for one requiring nearly 55 feet, as today’s largest container ships do, and that’s where the risk multiplies.
“We have better maps of the surface of Mars and the moon than we do the bottom of the ocean,” the Marsh report quoted Gene Feldman, a U.S. oceanographer for NASA, as saying.
“We know very little about most of the ocean.”
If progress is to be made, it may have to come from the International Maritime Organization and its Safety of Life at Sea convention.
As with the SOLAS weight verification mandate currently roiling container shipping markets, the IMO, in this case since January, has the power to audit the performance of countries in their obligation to provide safe passageways for vessels.
In a strange twist, however, the IMO has no power to force countries to fulfill that obligation, nor do vessel operators have to share the bathymetric data their vessels collect, according to the Marsh report.
Lacking that accurate data, it may not be a matter of if a catastrophic event will occur with an ultra-large container ship, but when.
And when it does, the industry best prepare for new regulations that lead to disruption the likes of which make all others look like a day at the beach.
In 1989 German ocean researchers started a unique long-term experiment off the coast of Peru. To explore the effects of potential deep sea mining on the seabed, they plowed in about eleven square kilometer area around the seabed.
In March 1968, a Soviet Golf II submarine carrying
nuclear ballistic missiles exploded and sank 1,500 nautical miles
northwest of Hawaii.
Five months later, the US government discovered the
wreckage—and decided to steal it.
So began Project AZORIAN, one of the most absurdly ambitious operations the CIA has ever conceived.
The potential payoff of Project AZORIAN was tremendous—a detailed
look at Soviet weapons capabilities, and maybe some highly coveted
cryptographic equipment.
But the 1,750-ton submarine had sunk to a depth
of 16,500 feet, and a massive recovery ship was needed to haul it up.
So the CIA recruited Howard Hughes to provide a cover story that would
explain why it was building a 619-foot-long vessel.
This historic film shows techniques used to conduct deep ocean mining of the sea floor, which were pioneered in the 1960s.
The potential for this type of mining (particularly of manganese nodules) was never fully realized.
Ironically, the program did end up providing the cover for the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193), a deep-sea drillship platform built for the United States Central Intelligence Agency Special Activities Division secret operation Project Azorian to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129, lost in April 1968.
Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE), as the ship was called at the time, was built between 1973 and 1974, by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. for more than US$350 million at the direction of Howard Hughes for use by his company, Global Marine Development Inc.
This is equivalent to $1.67 billion in present-day terms.
She set sail on 20 June 1974.
Hughes told the media that the ship's purpose was to extract manganese nodules from the ocean floor.
This marine geology cover story became surprisingly influential, spurring many others to examine the idea.
But in sworn testimony in United States district court proceedings and in appearances before government agencies, Global Marine executives and others associated with Hughes Glomar Explorer project unanimously maintained that the ship could not be used in any economically viable ocean mineral operation.
Hughes, the story went, was going to mine manganese nodules—potato-sized
rocks that form naturally on the abyssal plains—through his holding
company Summa Corporation.
A billionaire industrialist building a crazy
new ship to seek treasure on the ocean floor?
It sounded plausible
enough, and the public bought it.
“At the time, people didn’t realize this was all a big ploy,”
oceanographer Frank Sansone of the University of Hawaii at Manoa told
Gizmodo.
“What’s fascinating is that the CIA’s cover story set up a
whole line of research about manganese nodules.”
Over the years and decades to come, private industries would discover
that manganese nodules contain tremendous quantities of rare earth
metals—precious elements at the core of our smartphones, computers,
defense systems, and clean energy technologies.
We have an endless need
for these metals, and limited land-based supplies.
Now, forty years
after that CIA plot, we’re on the verge of an underwater gold rush.
One
that could, one day, allow us to tap into vast rare earth reserves at
the bottom of the ocean.
“You can basically supply all the rare earths you need from the deep sea,” John Wiltshire,
director of Hawaii’s Undersea Research Lab told Gizmodo.
“All of the
technology needed to do so is now in some form of development.”
But even if we desperately want to, mining the seafloor for rare
earths isn’t going to be easy.
Like Project AZORIAN, it’s going to be
fraught with technical challenges and enormous risks.
The term “rare earth” is misleading.
A group of seventeen chemically
similar elements—including the 15 lanthanide metals, scandium, and
yttrium—rare earths are actually plentiful in Earth’s crust.
Cerium is
more abundant than lead, and even the least common rare earths are
hundreds of times more plentiful than gold.
Clockwise from top center: praseodymium, cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, samarium, and gadolinium.
Image: Wikimedia
But because of their geochemical properties, rare earths don’t tend
to form the metal-rich ores that make mining economical.
Some minerals,
like the bastnäsite found in the only rare earth mine
in the US, can contain up to a few percent rare earth oxides.
More
often, rare earths are dispersed at vanishingly low concentrations.
To
get at them, huge volumes of rock are crushed, then subjected to
physical separation, caustic acids, and blazing heat.
It’s a costly,
labor intensive process, and it produces an unholy amount of radioactive
waste.
We don’t mine rare earths because it’s easy, but because we need
them.
“The technology sector is completely dependent on these elements,” Alex King, director of the Critical Materials Institute, told Gizmodo.
“They play a very unique role.”
There are innumerable ways these metals make our tech faster,
lighter, more durable, and more efficient. Take europium, used as a red
phosphor in cathode ray tubes and LCD displays.
It costs $2,000 a kilo,
and there are no substitutes.
Or erbium, which acts as a laser amplifier
in fiber optic cables.
It costs $1,000 a kilo, and there are no
substitutes.
Yttrium is sprinkled in the thermal coatings of jet
aircraft engines to shield other metals from intense heat.
Neodymium is
the workhorse behind the high-performance magnets found in nearly every
hard disk drive, audio speaker, wind turbine generator, cordless tool,
and electric vehicle motor.
The list goes on.
Cancer treatment drugs.
MRI machines.
Nuclear
control rods.
Camera lenses.
Superconductors.
Rare earths are essential
to such a bevy of technologies that a shortage would, according to the Natural Resources Council, “have a major negative impact on our quality of life.”
That reality makes the US government very worried. Because today,
we’re entirely dependent on rare earth imports.
And most of those
imports come from China.
For decades, an American company called Molycorp produced most of the
world’s rare earths, at a mine in Mountain Pass, California.
But by the
mid-1980s, enormous rare earth deposits were being discovered in inner
Mongolia and southern China.
With cheap labor and virtually no
environmental regulation, Chinese mining companies were able to undercut
the US industrythroughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Unable to remain competitive and facing public criticism over its
environmental impact, Molycorp shut down its mining operation in 2002.
By 2010, China controlled 97 percent of the market.
Then China started flexing its muscles.
First, it slashed rare earth export quotas,
restricting the global supply.
In September 2010, a maritime border
dispute prompted the Chinese government to temporarily suspend all rare
earth exports to Japan.
These events sent shockwaves through the international market.
Rare earth prices soared as technology companies quickly filled
inventories to protect themselves from a future supply disruption. Economist Paul Krugman
denounced US policymakers for allowing China to acquire “a monopoly
position exceeding the wildest dreams of Middle Eastern oil-fueled
tyrants.”
Production of rare earth oxides from 1950 to 2000. Image: Haxel et a. 2002
Six years on, fears of China’s rare earth dominance wound up being unfounded.
The scare motivated other countries to ramp up their rare earth production, breaking China’s stranglehold.
In late 2014, the World Trade Organization ruled against China for improper trade practices, compelling the government to abolish its rare earth quotas entirely.
Prices plummeted.
Nevertheless, fear of a future rare earth shortage has had lasting
effects on US policy, prompting the Department of Energy to pour
millions into basic research on reducing our use of rare earths and
recovering them from existing products.
Some industries have cut
back—Tesla doesn’t use rare earths
in its batteries or motors—but for other applications, that isn’t yet
feasible.
And demand for these metals is only going to grow.
“In an economy where the use of rare earths is growing, you cannot
recycle your way out of trouble,” King said.
“Eventually, there will
have to be new mines.”
In the shadowy fringes of the US intelligence community, tensions
were running high.
It was the summer of 1974, and after six years of
preparation, the CIA’s submarine salvage operation was finally on.
The Hughes Glomar Explorer,
a 36,000-ton beast of a ship designed to pull an entire submarine to
the surface from 20,000 feet under, was like nothing anyone had ever
built.
Trap doors opened below the water line into the middle of the
ocean.
A three-mile retractable pile system, outfitted with a claw-like
capture vehicle, would descend to the seafloor and haul up the Soviet
vessel.
The Hughes Glomar Explorer. Image: Wikimedia
The operation wound up being a major disappointment.
As the submarine
was being lifted to the surface, it snapped in two.
Some two thirds of
the wreckage, including nuclear missiles and naval code books, are said
to have plunged back to the seafloor.
Aside from the bodies of six USSR
naval officers, it’s unclear what the Hughes Glomar Explorer
hauled up.
As Wiltshire told Gizmodo, “There are at least three
different versions of this story going around. We’ll never know exactly
how much they brought back.”
The CIA considered a second recovery mission.
But before it could get
approval, reporter Jack Anderson, who had been on Project AZORIAN’s
trail for months, broke the story on national TV. Front-page stories
revealing the truth about the “mining” operation soon appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Subsequent recovery missions were scrapped, but Ocean Minerals
Company, the consortium led by Lockheed Martin that had developed mining
technology to recover the sub, spent the next few years steering the Hughes Glomar Explorer around the Clarion-Clipperton Zone—a 3.5 million square mile swath of the eastern Pacific—doing deep ocean mining experiments.
“The CIA built ocean mining equipment that actually worked,”
Wiltshire said.
“Ocean Minerals Company went on to mine manganese
nodules, and got a boatload through the early 1980s.”
The expeditions
drew attention to the riches on the seafloor, and a number of other
government agencies and private companies started sponsoring their own
deep ocean mining efforts.
A manganese nodule collected in 1982 from the Pacific.
Since the 1960s, mining companies have been attracted to manganese
nodules mainly for their nickel, copper, and cobalt.
But along the way,
geologists learned that the rocks also contain rare earth oxides—in
particular, the very rare and very expensive ones.
“All the big
land-based deposits in the world are almost solely light rare earths,”
Jim Hein, an ocean minerals specialist with the US Geological Survey,
told Gizmodo.
“Deep ocean deposits have a much higher percentage of
heavy rare earths. That’s the key difference.”
At first blush, the concentration of rare earths in manganese
nodules—roughly 0.1 percent—seems too low for commercial viability.
But
according to Mike Johnston, CEO of the deep ocean mining company
Nautilus Minerals, rare earths can be co-extracted along with other
valuable ores.
“What these rocks are is essentially a manganese sponge that has
soaked up a bunch of other metals,” Johnston told Gizmodo.
“To extract
those other metals out, you have to break bonds, either chemically or
with high heat.
Once you’ve done that, you can theoretically just
extract each of the different metals, including rare earths.”
Today, the global rare earth industry is producing a little over 100,000 tons of metals a year.
In the Clarion Clipperton Zone alone, there are an estimated 15 million tons of rare earth oxides locked away in manganese nodules.
The question is not whether the seafloor has rare earths.
It’s whether we can get at them in a way that makes business sense.
It’s been forty years since Project AZORIAN jumpstarted the deep
ocean mining industry.
We’ve not only discovered a potential fortune in
manganese nodules, but a slew of other tantalizing resources, including
sulfide deposits formed by underwater volcanoes, and deep sea
ferromanganese crusts, which also contain rare earths.
But as of now, not a single company has begun to mine seafloor minerals commercially.
The open ocean is no longer the Wild West.
In the decades since the Hughes Glomar Explorer first
set sail, a UN-backed Law of the Sea Convention was enacted to regulate
industry on the high seas.
As a result, a group called the
International Seabed Authority (ISA) is responsible for delineating deep
sea mining zones and doling out permits in international waters.
To date, more than a dozen companies
have received exploration licenses to prospect manganese nodules in the
Clarion Clipperton Zone, but nobody has been issued an actual mining
permit—yet.
First, the ISA is preparing regulations to prevent the
ecological shit show that usually ensues when humans try to get their
hands on a new chunk of Earth’s raw materials.
Exploration areas designated for mining companies in the Clarion Clipperton Zone in 2013.
Image: ISA
And indeed, many ecologists are downright horrified by the prospect
of profit-hungry corporations scraping, digging, and chopping up fragile
seafloor ecosystems for precious metals.
“You’re talking 100 percent
habitat destruction in the area you mine,” Wiltshire said.
“And because
these are thin deposits, you’re mining a large area.”
We think of the deep ocean as a cold, watery wasteland, but manganese
nodules, and other metal-rich environments on the seafloor, are
brimming with fish and marine invertebrates.
These critters tend to be
highly specialized, geographically restricted, and not at all accustomed
to disturbance.
As marine biologist Craig Smith noted
in a conservation planning paper published in 2013, it could take
organisms living in the Clarion Clipperton Zone thousands to millions of
years to recover from the impacts of mining.
The concerns raised by Smith and others prompted the ISA to carve out a vast swath of the zone—roughly 550,000 square miles—for
long-term conservation.
But protected waters far beyond the seafloor
might feel the impacts of ocean mining, too.
By kicking up sediment,
nutrients, and even toxic metals, mining may reduce water quality over
vast regions of open ocean, impacting pelagic fish and marine mammals.
For would-be miners, environmental concerns play into a bigger issue
with deep ocean mining: the whole thing is a huge financial risk.
Even as shallow ocean mining technology takes off—Nautilus Minerals
hopes to mine its first seafloor sulfide deposits in 2018—our ability to
collect manganese nodules remains limited.
While several companies have
trial-tested nodule collectors, we don’t yet have production-scale
mining systems that can haul thousands of tons of rock to the surface
15,000 feet up.
“To my mind, nobody’s really answered the question of
how they’re going to harvest this material,” Sansone said.
Artist’s concept of a
deep ocean manganese nodule mining operation, with autonomous robotic
collectors, a transport system for conveying material to the surface,
and a processing barge. Image: Aker Wirth
Any company hoping to pull it off will first need to invest heavily
in R&D, and prospect to find the regions of seafloor where nodules
are most concentrated.
And depending on how strict the ISA’s
environmental regulations are, companies may not see a return on
investment for a long time.
Still, many experts believe a deep ocean mining industry is
inevitable.
“It’s a technical challenge, but we started developing this
equipment when a Russian sub sank in 1974,” Wiltshire said.
“It’s an
environmental and investment delay rather than a fundamental technology
delay.”
Johnston agrees
“From where we sit, if I had an open checkbook, we
could be up and trial mining in the Clarion Clipperton Zone in a few
years,” he said.
“Financing it is the big issue.”
Forty years ago, the US government poured hundreds of millions into
an audacious endeavor to dredge up a piece of military technology from
the bottom of the ocean.
Will private companies take the same plunge to
bring us the metals behind the technologies we’ve grown to depend on?
The stakes are not as high as they were when two superpowers stood on
the brink of nuclear war.
But in the future, they could be.
There are
over 7 billion people on this planet, and an ever-growing number of them
want access to all manner of technology.
As societies transition off
fossil fuels, toward cleaner energy sources and quieter vehicles, demand
for rare earths and other exotic metals is only going to grow.
“At the end of the day, mining has impacts,” Johnston
said.
“But you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. If you
don’t produce these metals from the ocean, you’re going to restrict
yourself to a third of the planet. With the right management structures,
we should be able to do this for the benefit of mankind and the planet
in general.”
The world’s first ever deep sea mining operation is scheduled to begin offshore from the Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea in early 2018.
In this short film we explore how the two Pacific Island nations of Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu are working together with their communities to manage the future opportunities and impacts associated with this emerging industry.
While deep sea minerals could provide much needed revenue for several Pacific Island nations, questions remain about the impacts of mining on the marine environment and the many communities that depend on it for their livelihoods.
And while that cycle isn’t going away, climate change is messing with
the axis upon which our fair planet spins.
Ice melting has caused a
drift in polar motion, a somewhat esoteric term that tells scientists a
lot about past and future climate and is crucial in GPS calculations and
satellite communication.
Before 2000, Earth's spin
axis was drifting toward Canada (left globe).
Climate change-driven ice
loss in Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere is pulling the direction of
drift eastward.
Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Polar
motion refers to the periodic wobble and drift of the poles.
It’s been
observed for more than 130 years, but the process has been going on for
eons driven by mass shifts inside the earth as well as ones on the
surface.
For decades, the north pole had been slowly drifting toward
Canada, but there was a shift in the drift about 15 years ago.
Now it’s
headed almost directly down the Greenwich Meridian (sorry Canada no pole
for you, eh).
Like many other natural processes large and small, from sea levels to wildfires, climate change is also playing a role in this shift.
“Since about 2000, there has been a dramatic shift in this general direction,” Surendra Adhikari,
a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said.
“It is due to
climate change without a doubt. It’s related to ice sheets, in
particular the Greenland ice sheet.”
That ice sheet has seen its ice loss speed up and has lost an average of 278 gigatons of ice a year since 2000 as temperatures warm. The Antarctic
has lost 92 gigatons a year over that time while other stashes of ice
from Alaska to Patagonia are also melting and sending water to the
oceans, redistributing the weight of the planet. Adhikari and his colleague Erik Ivins published their findings
in Science Advances on Friday, showing that melting ice explains about
66 percent of the change in the shift of the Earth’s spin axis,
particularly the rapid losses occurring in Greenland.
The relationship between continental water mass and
the east-west wobble in Earth's spin axis.
Losses of water from Eurasia
correspond to eastward swings in the general direction of the spin axis
(top), and Eurasian gains push the spin axis westward (bottom). Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
It’s a huge, mind boggling process on the global scale, but imagine
it like a top.
Spinning a top with a bunch of pennies on it will cause
wobble and drift in a certain pattern.
If you rearrange the pennies, the
wobble and drift will be slightly different.
That’s essentially what climate change is doing, except instead of
pennies, it’s ice and instead of a top, it’s the planet.
Suffice to say,
the stakes are a little higher. Ice
loss explains most but not all of the shift. The rest can mostly be
chalked up to droughts and heavy rains in certain parts of the globe. Adhikari said this knowledge could be used to help scientists analyze
past instances of polar motion shifts and rainfall patterns as well as
answer questions about future hydrological cycle changes.
Ice is expected to continue melting and with it, polar motion is expected to continue changing as well.
“What I can tell you is we anticipate a big loss of mass from West
Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and that will mean that the general
direction of the pole won’t go back to Canada for sure,” Adhikari said.
If it continues moving down the Greenwich Meridian or meanders another way remains to be seen, though. “This
depends highly on the region where ice melts, or if the effect of ice
melt would be counterbalanced by another effect (for example sea level
rise, increased water storage on continents, changes of climate zones),”
Florian Seitz, the director of German Geodetic Research Institute, said in an email. In
the here and now, polar motion shifts matter for astronomical
observations and perhaps even more importantly for the average person,
GPS calculations.
Fast ride for "Defi solidaire en peloton", shot with a drone with Thibaut Vauchel-Camus and David Fanouillère, in Saint-Malo, Brittany, on Phantom catamarans
Ben Ainslie Racing set a new speed record in Bermuda, rippin' and runnin' at 30 knots, until the crash...
The Gitana Team has turned his MOD 70 flying trimaran.
During sea trials of its new appendages, conducted in March, the boat with reinforced construction, reached 43 knots with 20 knots of wind on a flat sea.
This spectacular session of sea trials allows the racing team off to advance in research related to the development of the Ultimate GitanaMaxi (33 m), under construction for six months at the Multiplast shipyard (Vannes) and should be launched in the summer of 2017.
Today, SpaceX made history. It is the first company—the first anybody to send a rocket to space and then land it on a floating barge. Sixth time is the charm, apparently. Persistence pays off. Or at least, anyone with an interest in low cost access to space hopes it will. The launch was flawless. At 4:43pm ET, the nine engines on board the Falcon 9’s stage 1 rocket began pushing 1.53 million pounds of thrust against Earth. After about two and a half minutes, and several hundred thousand feet of elevation gain, the first stage detached and began a controlled fall back to Earth, arcing towards the football field-sized barge (charmingly-named “Of Course I Still Love You”) in the Atlantic Ocean.
This is the second time SpaceX has successfully landed one of its rockets post-launch; the first time was in December, when the company's Falcon 9 rocket touched down at a ground-based landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after putting a satellite into space.
Now that SpaceX has demonstrated it can do both types of landings, the company can potentially recover and reuse even more rockets in the future.
And that could mean much greater cost savings for SpaceX.
Mastering the ocean landing is going to be important, since that’s the type of landing SpaceX will probably conduct more often.
At a recent NASA press conference, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance for SpaceX, said the next two to three flights will involve drone ship landings.
Ultimately, the company expects to land one-third of its rockets on land, and the rest at sea.
Rocket landing 'Another step toward the stars,' Elon Musk says
Why does SpaceX keep focusing on these ocean landings?
A drone ship floating on the ocean is a harder target to hit than a large expanse of ground, since it is smaller and floating on moving water.
Still, landing at sea can be less tricky than ground landings, and the main reason has to do with fuel.
To return back to Earth, the Falcon 9 has to use the fuel leftover from takeoff to reignite its engines in a series of burns.
These burns help to adjust the rocket's speed and reorient the vehicle into the right position for entering Earth's atmosphere and then landing.
Different types of landing techniques require different amounts of fuel, though, and that revolves around how the Falcon 9 launches.
The rocket doesn't travel straight upward into space but follows a parabolic arc up and away from the launch pad.
Onboard view of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landing in high winds
Because of this, the rocket has to go through a lot to conduct a ground landing.
The vehicle has to slow down in the direction it's heading, completely turn around, and then retread the vertical and horizontal distance it's covered to get back to the landing site.
That requires a lot of extra fuel.
Ocean landings aren't as complicated as that. SpaceX's drone ship can position itself in an ideal place to "catch" the vehicle on its more natural path back to Earth.
That decreases the distance the rocket needs to travel, as well as the amount of fuel needed to maneuver the Falcon 9 for landing.
For SpaceX missions that use up lots of fuel, performing a ground landing may not even be possible.
Rockets that launch heavy payloads or go to a high orbit need extra speed during the initial ascent, and extra speed needs more fuel.
Those Falcon 9s that have to reach extra high velocities don't have as much fuel leftover for the landing.
That’s when the drone ship is the best — if not only — option for recovery.
The whole point of landing these rockets is to help save SpaceX money on launch costs.
Right now, most rockets are destroyed or lost after they launch into space, meaning entirely new rockets must be built for each mission.
SpaceX hopes to recover as many rockets as possible to cut down on cost of creating new vehicles. The Falcon 9 costs $60 million to make and only $200,000 to fuel.
