SpaceX: Eutelsat/ABS Mission Hosted Webcast (opens in new tab)

As for the first stage:

"Following stage separation, the first stage of Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship. As with other GTO missions, the first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing difficult."

Mission Press Kit : http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/spacex_eutelsat_abs...

EDIT: Sounds like they lost the first stage, still not very clear on the details.

EDIT2: Confirmed loss of first stage by Elon Musk.

"Ascent phase & satellites look good, but booster rocket had a RUD on droneship"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743096769001578498

Another successful satellite launch and more experimental data (aka they have a new failure mode for landing things). It is really awesome that they can be collecting the expertise to land the first stage "for free"[1] like this and every failure has improved the lander in some key way.

I can't wait to see the reconstructed footage of this event. From what we got initially it seemed a bit off to the left of screen and generating a lot of smoke.

[1] I realize it costs them time and money to operate the barge and recover the stages, but the cost of building those stages and launching them is covered by the launch contract so this work has extremely low marginal cost for rocket research.

As usual, the reddit /r/spacex launch thread is a useful resource: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4o5u6r/rspacex_eute...

If you are wondering, the video feed from the barge got cut off during the landing, but it didn't appear that it was very good. Lot of smoke. But I'm no pro. For now, we (the viewers) don't know if the landing was OK or KO.

Here's the bit where they "landed": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNmtUEvI5A&t=36m18s

Looks to me like they may have stuck the "landing" but it was hard, broke something and the vehicle was on fire. Listen to the crowd and I think you can hear when the RUD went down.

It was announced on the webcast that they lost the Falcon 9. Second stage is still looking good, on a good GTO orbit after the second burn.

Am I the only one who thought the landings are already starting to be boring? Smoke, rocket is there, cheers from the engineers...I remember Musk expected a few months ago to be able to save 10-20% of the Stage 1 this year (while the ratio increasing over time). But I guess they already can achieve 70-80% success rate, which is a cost saving that is already enough to kill competition.