SpaceX has announced that the company is planning to land its Falcon 9 rocket that is scheduled to be launched on January 17, 2016, on a drone ship, which is an autonomous floating platform.

The rocket is scheduled to take off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and will be boarded with the Jason-3 satellite of NASA space agency. However, this time the rocket will land back in the ocean and not a launch pad on ground.

SpaceX successfully landed its first stage Falcon 9 rocket on December 21, 2015. The drone ship has been named as ‘Just Read the Instructions’ by Elon Musk. The drone was earlier used by the company to attempt the landings from Cape Canaveral. Just Read the Instructions has been transported to the West Coast for this launch after being refurbished and amended.

It is a much more complex task to land a rocket on a drone ship as compared to ground because of the stability factor. Attempting a landing on the drone means that an already unsteady rocket will be landed on a somewhat unbalanced podium since the sea is already in some amount of movement. So, it is more sensible to restrict the variables during such complex missions.

However, the reason for SpaceX’s decision for a drone landing might be that the company wants to test the new method away from the masses. This is because when the company earlier tried to land rockets on a drone two times; the mission went bad and resulted in explosions.

This time around it is possible that the company failed to receive NASA’s approval for ground landing. If the company is successful in its experiment, the future launches will become more flexible. Depending upon the nature of launch it will give option for either ground or drone landing.