SpaceX launches Dragon, lands Falcon 9 booster on ship

SpaceX hopes to see two vehicles berth at their destinations Sunday: a Dragon capsule at the International Space Station, and the booster that launched it at Port Canaveral.

Completing a perfect launch Friday, SpaceX returned the Dragon to flight nine months after one was lost in a launch failure, and stuck its first landing of a Falcon 9 booster on a ship at sea.

The Dragon’s flight with nearly 7,000 pounds of supplies and experiments, including an important prototype module, restored confidence SpaceX can deliver critical supplies to the station and its six-person crew.

And the dramatic booster landing, following one on land at Cape Canaveral in December, advanced SpaceX’s bigger ambitions to slash launch costs by reusing rockets.

“It’s another step towards the stars,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said of the landing. “To really open up access to space, we’ve got to achieve full and rapid reusability, and being able to do that for the primary rocket booster is going to be a huge impact on cost.”

The Falcon 9 and Dragon blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station into clear skies at 4:43 p.m.

About 10 minutes later, video showed the rocket’s 14-story first stage dropping back to Earth, re-lighting a Merlin engine to brake its speed and touching down on a “drone ship” roughly 200 miles down range.

Unlike at least four previous tries at sea landings, “the rocket landed instead of putting a hole in the ship, or tipping over, so we’re really excited about that,” said Musk.

The achievement even earned a congratulatory tweet from President Obama: “Congrats SpaceX on landing a rocket at sea,” he said.

It helped that seas were calm and the overall weather very good, but Musk said the stage tilted through winds as stiff as 50 mph.

Crews were expected to board the ship SpaceX calls the “Of Course I Still Love You” (a reference to Iain Banks novels), place steel shoes over the stage’s four landing legs and weld them to the deck to keep the rocket upright.

Musk said the ship was expected to return to port Sunday, where a crane would remove the stage for transportation to facilities at the Cape or Kennedy Space Center. The booster will be inspected thoroughly, and its nine engines test-fired multiple times in the coming weeks.

If deemed flight-worthy, the rocket will be the first SpaceX launches for a second time, possibly as soon as June, and possibly with a paying customer along for the ride.

That would be a first in orbital rocketry. Blue Origin, the company backed by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, last week launched and landed its smaller, suborbital New Shepard booster for a third time in West Texas.

Meanwhile, SpaceX on Friday reported that the Dragon reached a good orbit and was on track for a rendezvous with the ISS around 7 a.m. Sunday — its first visit to the station in a year.

“We’re very excited to have our cargo and the Dragon safely on orbit,” said Kirk Shireman, NASA’s space station program manager.

British astronaut Tim Peake will use the station’s 58-foot robotic arm to grapple the capsule as it floats nearby, before it is attached to a port and hatches are opened Monday.

By the end of next week, the same robotic arm is expected to remove a prototype habitat designed by Bigelow Aerospace from the Dragon’s unpressurized “trunk” and install it at a port.

In late May, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, will be inflated to its full size, about 13 feet long and 10 feet around, and more than four times its packed volume.

The “expandable” technology is seen as key to commercial space stations that could eventually replace the ISS, and potentially to deep space habitats.

SpaceX is targeting its next Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral, and its next attempted landing at sea, before the end of this month. That landing will be more difficult, since the rocket will fly at higher speed to put a communications satellite in a much higher orbit.

But Musk is confident that over a few years, SpaceX will get good enough to re-launch rockets within weeks, needing to do little more than hose them down and refuel them.

“Like an aircraft,” he said. “We’ve got to ultimately get rockets to that point.”

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 orjdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at@flatoday_jdeanand on Facebook atfacebook.com/jamesdeanspace.