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The Falcon 9 booster that launched four astronauts into orbit last weekend returned to Florida’s space coast on Thursday aboard a SpaceX drone, sailing to Port Canaveral with a meager but otherwise in good shape after apparently slipped across the ship’s deck in high winds and rough seas.
Assuming post-flight inspections reveal no major issues, SpaceX aims to reuse the booster to launch the next Crew Dragon mission which is scheduled to take off on March 30. This will mark the first SpaceX crew mission to fly with a reused Falcon 9 booster.
The all-new 15-story booster landed on SpaceX’s drone about nine-and-a-half minutes after takeoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Sunday evening. Live video from the landing ship appeared to show the first stage of Falcon 9 – designated B1061 – landing squarely on the ship’s deck in the Atlantic Ocean more than 500 kilometers northeast of Cape Canaveral.
Falcon 9 boosters perform propulsive landings by re-igniting the mid-rocket motor during a braking maneuver just before touchdown.
By the time the rocket arrived in Port Canaveral on Thursday, the thruster was thin and one of its four landing legs appeared to be extended over the edge of the ship’s deck. Another landing leg was lifted off the bridge, while SpaceX’s “Octagrabber” robot secured the booster for the return trip to the Florida coast.
SpaceX has regularly flown Falcon 9 boosters previously used in commercial satellite missions since 2017 in an effort to cut costs. The company also claims that reusing boosters makes the Falcon 9 more reliable, but U.S. government customers have been slower to sign up for flight missions with previously used rocket hardware.
Earlier this year, the US Space Force agreed to start using reused SpaceX boosters on launches with national security launches, and NASA plans to do the same for crew missions starting this year. next.
The four astronauts who took off from Kennedy Space Center on Sunday flew on SpaceX’s first operational crew rotational flight to the International Space Station. The mission, known as Crew-1, followed the Crew Dragon’s first piloted test flight to the space station earlier this year.
NASA and SpaceX have agreed to use the Crew-1 launch booster for the upcoming Crew Dragon flight, known as Crew-2.
While there was no indication that the lean of the booster would affect its ability to be reused for the Crew-2 mission, NASA has other options available if needed.
“We have a backup in case anything happens at this particular stage, but we have done all of our inspections at this point,” said Kathy Lueders, associate administrator of the Human Exploration and Exploitation Mission Directorate of The NASA. “We did all the work. We understand the material. So we would really like to use it because it makes Crew-2’s job easier. “
One backup booster that SpaceX and NASA could use for the Crew-2 mission is the Falcon 9 booster which is expected to launch the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich oceanographic satellite from California, Lueders said. This launch is scheduled for Saturday and the thruster will return to a land landing facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base a few minutes after takeoff.
“There are a few more out there,” Lueders said. “The good thing about SpaceX is that there is a range of hardware that we can use.”
More photos of the Falcon 9 booster return to Port Canaveral on Thursday are posted below.
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