SQL Server was unable to communicate with the LaunchPad service.

Today I was trying to run some R scripts against SQL Server.

All of a sudden the "R" scripts no longer worked, they returned the below error:

SQL Server was unable to communicate with the LaunchPad service. Please verify the configuration of the service.

To fix this error, I went to Administrative Tools -- Services.  Looked whether the LaunchPad Service is running.  I had to start this service as shown below.

This fixed the error.