"Close, but no cigar this time," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reported on Twitter less than 20 minutes after the 4:47 a.m. launch. "Bodes well for the future though."
The primary mission was to place a Dragon capsule in orbit that is carrying more than 5,000 pounds of food, supplies and science experiments to the station and its six-person crew.
The resupply mission became even more important after last October's failure in Virginia by Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket, which left SpaceX as the only U.S. cargo hauler for most of this year.
The 208-foot Falcon 9 blasted off on its second attempt, four days after a late abort of the first countdown. SpaceX swapped out a faulty rocket part, and today's countdown was quiet.
The rocket lifted off with 1.3 million pounds of thrust, streaking northeast into pre-dawn darkness atop a column of flame, appearing to angle away from a half-moon hanging over the Cape.
More than the launch, it was SpaceX's first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on an offshore platform it dubbed the "autonomous spaceport drone ship" that generated buzz and captivated mission observers.
SpaceX had twice steered 14-story boosters to soft landings in the Atlantic Ocean, but a successful touchdown on the platform would have marked a major leap forward in the company's effort to develop reusable rockets.
The booster was scheduled to land about nine minutes after liftoff, slightly before the Dragon capsule reached orbit and deployed its power-generating solar arrays.
Soon after that Musk, who was watching from SpaceX's mission control center at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, reported that the booster had hit its target -- in itself an impressive feat -- but too hard.
"Ship itself is fine," he said. "Some of the support equipment on the deck will need to be replaced..."
He added that SpaceX was unable to get good video of the landing attempt, but joked that engineers would reconstruct it from the data they did collect.
"Pitch dark and foggy," he said. "Will piece it together from telemetry and ... actual pieces."
None of that mattered particularly to NASA, which only cared that the Dragon and its cargo safely reached orbit.
The unmanned spacecraft is on course to reach the station early Monday, where astronauts will capture it with the outpost's 58-foot robotic arm.
The resupply mission is SpaceX's fifth of 12 planned under a $1.6 billion NASA contract.
The launch was the first of the New Year from Cape Canaveral. Up next is United Launch Alliance's planned Jan. 20 launch of an Atlas V rocket carrying a Navy communications satellite. The launch window runs from 7:43 p.m. to 8:27 p.m.
SpaceX could follow as soon as Jan. 29 with another Falcon 9 launch of a government science satellite, and possibly another landing attempt, if the drone ship can be repaired quickly.
