TECH

SpaceX Falcon 9 booster draws crowd at Port Canaveral

James Dean
FLORIDA TODAY

Paul McHugh fishes regularly at Port Canaveral, but it was a different sort of catch that drew him to the water near Milliken’s Reef Tuesday morning.

Across the channel from where his line dangled with a fiddler crab bait, a 14-story SpaceX rocket stage hung from a crane like a giant trophy fish as it was lifted from a ship’s deck to a nearby stand.

McHugh was among dozens of curious onlookers gathered to see the Falcon 9 rocket booster that arrived in port before dawn, more than three days after launching an International Space Station supply mission from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

SpaceX launches Dragon, lands Falcon 9 booster on ship

After the 4:43 p.m. Friday liftoff, the rocket’s first stage did something no rocket has done before, flying back from space under its own power and sticking a landing on a ship floating roughly 200 miles down range in the Atlantic Ocean.

“It was quite the feat landing it on that barge,” said McHugh, 62, a retired computer consultant from Cape Canaveral. “I thought it was going to be a lot bigger than that.”

“It makes you proud to be an American to see something like this,” added friend Becky Bennett, 57.

The once gleaming white rocket stage was singed gray at the top and black at its the base from its fall through the atmosphere and engine firings that controlled its descent.

Four previous sea landing attempts had ended with crashes or the rocket tipping over. This time the rocket remained standing on four landing legs, slightly off-center on SpaceX’s “drone ship,” a modified barge named the “Of Course I Still Love You,” after a starship in the sci-fi novel "The Player of Games," by the late Iain M. Banks.

“It’s quite a tiny target,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Friday. “It’s really trying to land on a postage stamp there. And it’s moving.”

Although SpaceX achieved a historic first landing of an orbital booster at the Cape in December, Friday’s water landing was as significant to the company’s goal to regularly reuse rockets, driving down the cost of spaceflight.

At least half of SpaceX’s missions will launch at speeds and trajectories for which water landings are the only option.

“It’s proven that it can work,” said Musk.

After the stage landed Friday, crews placed steel shoes around the rocket’s landing feet and welded them to the ship’s deck, to keep it upright during the journey home.

At the port on Tuesday, a yellow crane lifted the booster off the boat to a stand where the legs were to be folded up and the stage lowered sideways for transport to a SpaceX hangar at Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A.

There, or possibly at SpaceX's pad 40, engineers plans to fire the rocket's nine Merlin main engines as many as 10 times to determine if it is fit for another flight.

If so, Musk believes the booster could launch a second time as soon as June, with a customer to be named later.

“In the future, hopefully we’ll be able to re-launch them within a few weeks,” he said.

On Tuesday, some spectators sat in beach chairs or gazed through binoculars to watch crews working on the first space-flown rocket returned to the port by boat.

The Space Coast over the years has seen winged orbiters fly home from space, and shuttle solid rocket boosters towed through the water, but never an “expendable” rocket returning from a landing at sea.

“This is so special,” said Hetty Kruijswijk, 68, a retiree from Amsterdam and Cape Canaveral, who packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a morning watching the rocket recovery effort. “It is history. It is fantastic that they can do this.”

“Amazing,” said her husband Simon, 65, recalling the landing. “The whole sea, one little pontoon thing like this and…boom.”

Like many interested observers, Steven Keyes visited Port Canaveral on Sunday, when SpaceX thought the booster might arrive. The 31-year-old Titusville resident returned Tuesday to check it out with two young sons, ages 3 and 10 months.

“They’re not quite old enough to understand it, but I am,” he said. “What (SpaceX is) doing is really impressive. Hopefully they get to reuse this booster. So I figured I’d just stare at it for a few minutes.”

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